


What's in your Head?

by SpaceWaffleHouseTM



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Road Trip, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Ben and Rey Immediately Banter Like Old Friends, Bite of Spite, F/M, Fluff and Smut, Found Cure for the Zombie Apocalypse, No Pregnancy, Oral Sex, Smut, Suspense, Tagging is Fun Kids, Zombie!Ben, love in the time of zombies, slight depictions of violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-10-18
Packaged: 2020-10-12 12:39:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 31,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20564480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpaceWaffleHouseTM/pseuds/SpaceWaffleHouseTM
Summary: Whilst on a food run in the middle of an abandoned city during the apocalypse, Rey gets caught on the end of a metaphorical string by one of the undead. With nowhere to run and spite in her veins, she decides to bite him before he can bite her.She never expected him to turn back into a human instead. She definitely didn't expect to drive across state lines with him trying to spread the cure for the end of days.





	1. The Resurrection of Ben Solo

**Author's Note:**

> I just want to thank everyone who edited this really fast, because they made this what it is. I wrote this while I was away at field camp in fuckass, USA, and I was so distracted that I seemed to miss every single typo imaginable, so I'd like to thank [TazWren](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TazWren/pseuds/TazWren), [crossingwinter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter), and shelikespretties, whose ao3 name I will edit in soon, all of whom are wonderful writers and people, especially for putting up with my typos and crazy field camp brain.

Growing up, Rey’s favorite comic book character had been the Flash. Something about the idea of running so fast that she could break the sound barrier was one of the coolest things she’d ever heard of. She always used to try to run that fast _ just to see _if there was a chance she could ever attain such a speed. She never did, but she’d developed a skill that had led to an impressive high school track career, earning her a scholarship to a college that got her a degree that was now useless in the world she lived in. 

Or rather—it had been useless for two months, three weeks, and five days. Useless ever since the city she called home had been overrun by a plague not unlike something out of _ The Walking Dead _ or _ World War Z _ and she’d been forced to make a break north, running on foot for the most part from south Georgia up through the hot, dense, southern heat. Rey had run from the Okefenokee Swamp all the way up into a town just outside of Macon, and from there, she’d managed to jack a car, another skill she’d learned in the era she now referred to as _ before. _

Once upon a time, she’d been a promising mechanic, working part-time in a shop to pay off her loans before she went off to grad school. Now she was a lone survivalist. The sole living being in a city once populated by half a million people. 

Atlanta had once been the state’s capital, but nearly three months after the apocalypse started—thanks to a mistake made by the CDC—Rey was all that was left after the dead killed everything. Well, after they’d killed everything and moved on to greener pastures. The hordes for the most part had headed north into Dahlonega or south back toward Macon—passing them on the way up had been the most harrowing moment of her twenty four years—and left the state’s central city alone. 

That didn’t mean there weren’t stragglers every now and then and, in moments like the one she found herself in now, that reminder had never been so cruel or so fresh. 

She’d been up in what had once been an art district, gathering the remnants of food that had been left at a vending machine in some museum when she’d heard the familiar, tell-tale moans from the dead that indicated they were near. It was just minutes after she’d smashed open the glass front of the machine that no other desperate survivor had thought to check, and she’d had raked most of its contents—_ fuck _she’d been delighted to see a bag of Cheetos in there—into her bag when she’d heard the sounds, and her blood had gone cold. 

In the months since the world had turned to shit, she’d gotten good at gauging just how many dead ones were in a horde, and from the shuffling footfalls and little grunts and groans she could hear now, it was undoubtedly a dozen. That number wasn’t too much to handle but unless she was _ extremely _ lucky, she wouldn’t be able to fight them off if there were more. 

Thinking quickly, Rey dashed around the corner from the vending machine, ducking behind a display of an ancient looking vase before peeking her head out to get a look at the oncoming threat. It took them a few seconds, but eventually, the dead came slowly shuffling around in front of the vending machine she’d been pulling snacks from just seconds earlier. _ Assholes. _She’d have to go back for it after they moved on—hopefully to the nearby staircase that lead to the second floor—but for now all she could do was wait until they left, until they searched for fresh meat elsewhere. 

She studied them intently as they shuffled past the machine, their dirty—sometimes bloodied—feet staining the perfectly white, marble floor. Up until she’d come in there, the museum had been largely undisturbed, and she’d left it that way while she raided any and all nearby grocery stores. Unfortunately for her, though, the heart of Atlanta wasn’t exactly rich in that sort of thing, and just two months into the end of days, Rey was already having to look elsewhere for food. The next day, she’d planned to take a look at some of the city’s suburbs to see what they had left but she didn’t anticipate having much luck, so for the past week she’d been stocking up on vending machine food. 

Flat, warm Pineapple Fanta was quickly becoming her least favorite drink, but in this new world she lived in, she was going to have to get used to it. Especially as the world continued to look more and more like the rotten flesh of the people she was looking at now. 

Some of them still looked normal, and her heart broke for them. There were two women and a man who looked like they’d only recently been bitten. Their flesh hadn’t quite sunken in fully yet. It hadn’t started to decay to the point where it dropped off and they looked bruised all over. From where Rey was standing, it just looked like they all needed a good night’s sleep and some food. 

With a sad sigh for what had happened to them, Rey stepped back, but failed to look at what was behind her. It wasn’t until she heard a loud crash on the floor that she realized there had been another priceless vase behind her, and she winced as the sound of the shattering echoed loudly. Before she could even open her eyes, she heard the sound of the dead snarling as they now marched toward her, and her blood ran cold at the sight of the dozen of them staggering toward her. 

“_ Fuck _,” she breathed, then she looked backwards, her breath hitching when she realized that all that was behind her was a dead end. Rey was going to have to fight her way out of this—while it wouldn’t be impossible, it would be phenomenally difficult. 

Taking a deep breath, she reached behind her for the sword she kept strapped to her back at all times, unsheathing it in one smooth motion that she’d taken the time to perfect over the past couple of months. As they advanced on her at that agonizingly slow, yet determined pace, Rey swung the weapon threateningly in front of her, screaming a battle cry before she dove in, and immediately began to fight off her assailants. 

The first two dead ones she encountered fell with the first slash of her sharp blade, which sliced through their necks like they were nothing—their blood splattering rather disgustingly against the otherwise pristine white walls—before she moved onto the next ones. Wincing at the sight, Rey prepared to attack the next two, sending her blade through the chest of one and the head of another, both falling to the ground with sickeningly dull thuds. More red stained her surroundings and fell on her like droplets of rain, but even though there was a familiar nausea building in the pit of her stomach, she pushed on, fear coursing through her veins as the small horde began forcing her backward. 

Even though they fell fairly easily once they were down, they still had the advantage of numbers, and so Rey retreated, backing down the hallway as they advanced. She swore under her breath as she cut one down, and kicked yet another back with her right foot while she slashed through the first. The dead ones—a man and a teenage girl by the looks of it—collapsed with more dull thuds. 

Her breathing grew labored as she finished them off one by one until, by the time she had only three left to fight, she was backed up against the wall and fighting the snarling beasts off with the equally loud, almost feral growls that accompanied every strike of her sword. It wasn’t long before two more fell, and then it was just her and the man she’d noticed earlier whom she suspected was newly turned. 

Now that it was just the two of them she was able to look at him closely, to process that he used to be a person. He was a good bit taller than she was, with dark hair that was greasy and tangled, and clothing stained from his exposure to the elements. He looked every bit as ragged as the average dead one, only she swore that as he grabbed ahold of her wrist, she could still smell a faint hint of cologne. 

Whoever was still wearing fucking perfume of any sort during the end of the world was an absolute fool, but Rey supposed she couldn’t judge as his sheer size pinned her against the wall and her sword fell out of her hand from the force of the impact. While the creature in front of her growled she gasped from fright, but quickly gathered herself, trying to see any potential exit she could use now that the other dead were permanently out of commission. 

Unfortunately, nothing seemed open, and not because the hallway behind her was crowded, but the dead one was closing in on her too fast. He was inches from her face, lips pulled back over a decaying mouth as he attempted to bite her, his gaze honed in on her neck as she struggled against him. Uselessly, Rey begged for mercy before she stopped—she’d defeated the bulk of a horde only to die at the hands of the one, stupid man who wore fucking cologne during the apocalypse. It was absolutely fucking ridiculous and she cursed the day he’d been born precisely because it had indirectly led them to this very moment, with him dead already and her about to die. 

It wasn’t fair. She was going to die alone there, the last survivor in Atlanta. Dead inside the High Museum of Art, her blood coating the walls in a terrible form of a painting that would stain them for years to come. 

The dead one shifted his grip on her wrist, bringing his arm closer to her face as he bent down to close the remaining gap between his mouth and her neck. In the final seconds of her life, as she got a glimpse of his wrist, an incredibly stupid idea came to her—the likes of which hadn’t been seen by man in centuries. The sleeve of his navy blue button down had rolled up, revealing the still pale skin of his wrist, and she looked up into his eyes as he continued to descend toward her neck. They were bloodshot, the whites of his eyes almost completely red as they stared at her blankly. 

“Go to hell,” she growled at him before she leaned over, and bit into his wrist, her teeth breaking skin before she let go. Then, suddenly, they both tumbled to the floor as he fell backwards with what resembled an anguished cry. The sound shocked her, and as the air was knocked from her lungs upon the impact with the ground, she heard another strangled cry leave _ his _lungs, almost as if he were actually in pain. 

The dead ones didn’t experience pain. Not ever. 

If she cut off a limb, they kept snarling and growling, kept approaching without seeming to notice they now weighed twenty pounds less. They never did this. Never in the two months since the hordes of dead had taken over the southeast, had she heard one of them cry. 

As the shock from their fall wore off, Rey pressed down on his shoulders to get a better look at him as he suddenly started to gasp for breath, and she watched as the color returned to his skin—as the _ life _returned to his body. The whites of his eyes slowly regained their natural color, his skin began to look more put together and lively, glowing with that sort of luminescence that only came from copious amounts of human sweat, and his pink lips opened so that he could gasp for air, so that he could take a deep, gulping breath. 

At least, he attempted to, all he managed to do as Rey watched, completely awestruck, was to desperately suck air into his lungs. Hands clawed at his throat as he tried to get air through a passage that seemed to be blocked. Her eyes widened as she rolled off of him, searching desperately for a way to help the man who was seemingly coming back to life in front of her. Thoughts that this was all stunningly impossible crossed her mind, but they were drowned out as she helped to lift him into a sitting position, and crawled into the space behind him to wrap her arms around his waist. Years of first aid training came in handy as she hooked her hands together beneath his diaphragm, and squeezed him tightly a couple of times. 

Almost immediately, she heard rather than saw a disgusting rush of fluids leave his mouth. She closed her eyes against the sound as she pressed her ear to his back, and listened to him take his first successful gulp of sweet oxygen. In spite of the suddenly increased smell of death and decay—which she suspected was all thanks to his last meal as a dead one—Rey smiled as he swayed dizzily in her arms, and she reached up a hand to stroke his sweat soaked hair. “Breathe, you can do it,” she whispered to him, as he took in a series of shaky, still half-choked sounding breaths. “Just breathe.”

A groan came from him then, and she heard him whisper something vaguely before he collapsed on top of her, his dead weight forcing them both to the ground rather roughly. The air escaped Rey’s lungs in a rush as the man’s shoulder blade hit her sternum, but she quickly gathered herself and rolled him off of her. She winced as his pant leg dipped into the pool of brown he’d ejected from his stomach, but she could clean him off later. For now, she needed to ensure that he was still alive, that he was breathing properly, and that his heart was in working condition. She was no nurse, but she knew an uneven heartbeat when she’d heard one. 

Sometimes, it paid to have lived under many foster families’ roofs. Many occupations meant many lessons learned. 

The negatives were another story entirely. 

Rey crawled back over to him as she sat up, and turned his head to the side in case he needed to vomit again while he was passed out. The thought made her think of what she was supposed to do when someone was passed out drunk, and she nearly laughed. She wished it were that simple, but this man had just come back from the dead, and she suspected he would have an infinitely worse hangover. 

Performing as thorough an inspection as she could, Rey pressed her ear to his chest, fearful at first that she wouldn’t feel a heartbeat, but then she felt it racing beneath his skin. It fluttered and boomed in a perfect, beautiful rhythm that was music to her ears, and she smiled as she felt his chest rise and fall with the intake of an even breath. He was alive. It was impossible, but he was fucking alive. If he weren’t unconscious and didn’t smell of human remains, she probably would’ve kissed this asshole. 

For now, she had to settle with taking him back to her hideout, and waiting for him to wake up so she could ask him her many, many questions. Did he remember what he did as a dead one? Did he remember who he was at all? How in the hell had he come back to life? Did he know there was a cure or had she been the first to discover it? 

That last question had Rey taking a moment to pause as she lifted her head from his chest. She just might’ve been the first to discover this. How else could she explain no one ever having come up with a cure for the dead? Sure, it was possible that maybe they’d done it someplace far enough away that the news hadn’t reached her—which wouldn’t take much distance at all, really—but as she looked down at his forearm, as she looked down at the white crescent moon that marked the place she’d bitten him, she had a feeling that wasn’t the case. 

This was a new discovery. It was pivotal, world-changing, and life-altering, and if she could keep this man alive, she could prove her findings and take them to people who could do something about it. 

She could stop the apocalypse and bring people back. 

With that decided, she continued her inspection of the man, gently patting him down to see if anything was awry—but keeping her hands away from anything that could be considered groping—and then sifting through his pockets to see if she could find an ID. That last bit was more out of curiosity than anything else, but she wanted to know who he was. This man was patient zero; he was the beginning of the end, and she wanted to know his name as soon as possible. 

Luckily, her search produced a wallet at a shockingly fast speed, and she grinned as she pulled it from the left front pocket of his trousers. She found a driver’s license with that signature little peach at the corner of every Georgia ID, and caught sight of a much younger, more awkward looking man in the photo. Still, it was unmistakably him, and she felt her heart race as she read his name for the first time. 

_ Benjamin Solo. _

Ben Solo. The man’s name was Ben Solo, twenty nine years old, six feet and three inches tall, with brown eyes, and an impressive shock of raven hair on his head. Rey looked between the license and his sleeping face, almost entranced for a moment by how peaceful he looked as she stared down at him. It almost looked—if she ignored the stains of human remains on his chin and clothes—as if he’d simply been sleeping all this time—as if he were just taking a well earned nap. 

From the outside, there was no telling what he’d been through, but on the inside… she was sure it was absolute and pure hell. 

Putting his ID back into his wallet, Rey decided to hold onto it for a little while longer as she shoved it into her pocket. Then, she stood up and walked back over to the wall where she’d dropped her sword. Shaking her head at the memory of her poor performance during their fight, she picked it up, and slid it back into its sheath before turning back around to face him. If she hadn’t lost that fight, she supposed he would just be another dead one and she wouldn’t have the cure for the fucking apocalypse in her hands, but even in spite of the relief that thought brought her, she still felt a flicker of disappointment that she hadn’t won. 

With her pride slightly wounded, she walked back over to him and bent down before she wrapped her arms around his waist. Lifting him proved rather difficult, but with much straining and grunting, she managed to lift him onto her shoulder in a sort of fireman’s carry. Once he was stable in the hold, Rey began to trudge out of the museum, bending down only once to grab hold of her backpack full of shitty vending machine snacks before she made her way towards the exit. She did one last, thorough sweep of the outside, then she kicked the glass doors open—nearly losing her hold on poor Ben in the process—and brought him out to the street where her old clunker of a car—likely from his year of birth—sat waiting for them. 

The hot Georgia sun beat down on her back as she stumbled slowly toward the car, and nearly collapsed as she finally reached its passenger side door. She took several panting breaths before she yanked it open and placed him in the seat as gently as she could. Unfortunately, her exhaustion meant she wasn’t very soft in her motions, and she wound up almost dropping him down into the seat. A visible wince cinched her features as his head made a loud ** _THONK! _ ** against the roof of her car, but she could deal with that later. For the time being, she had to get him out of there, and away to… _ relative _safety. 

After making sure that the slight blow to his head hadn’t killed him, Rey adjusted him in the seat, making sure he was in a somewhat upright position before she reached around behind him, and did his seat belt, strapping him in for the ride. “Hang in there,” she told him, listening to the buckle click as it latched into place, then she pulled back and rested her hands on his shoulders. “I don’t know if you can hear me, but it’s gonna be okay. I’m getting you out of here. If you wake up before we get home… please don’t freak out.”

With that, she pulled back, and inspected him one last time before she shut his door, and made her way around the car to hers. She was breathing hard when she finally got into the car; and her fingers fumbled from nerves as she searched her pockets for the keys. She continued shaking as she put them in the ignition, missing it several times before she finally found success, and the engine turned on with a quiet roar. 

The moment it was on, Rey placed her shaky hands on the steering wheel, and gripped it more tightly than she needed to as she began to drive them away from the High Museum and back towards the downtown area. She drove more slowly than ever before, uncertain whether she even passed twenty miles per hour since she spent almost the entire time checking to make sure that Ben was still alive. Every single time she looked over, his chest was rising and falling steadily, but she’d never seen this process before. For all she knew, it wasn’t one that was easy to survive. Maybe it had a one hundred percent mortality rate, and maybe it had zero. There was only one way of knowing, and she fully intended to find out. 

They arrived at the base of the hotel she’d started calling home after a somewhat harrowing forty minute drive. Ben’s periodic groans assured her that he’d survived the journey, and she couldn’t help the smile that rose to her face as she looked over, and saw he was still moving. If he was still alive now, then it stood to reason he’d make it through, didn’t it?

Putting the car in park, Rey hopped out, and grabbed her food supply pack, securing it over her shoulder along with her sword before she walked back around to Ben’s side of the car. He was still sleeping when she got there, and she sighed as she opened his door, undoing his seatbelt before resuming the fireman’s carry from earlier. A pained grunt escaped her at first, but she ignored it in favor of resuming her mission of getting him safely to the room she’d started calling her home. 

Her legs burned the entire way through the lobby, up the stairwell, and down the hall to her room, but she never dropped him. She couldn’t afford to. If she injured him and he didn’t wake up… she didn’t know how she’d live with herself. 

Eventually, she got him into her room, and with little shame, she collapsed on top of him the moment the bed was within reach, panting hard as the sweat on her brow soaked into his dark colored shirt, making it appear even deeper in color than it already was. Rey didn’t care though, she was aching too much to worry about anything beyond whether or not he was still alive. 

His chest continued rising and falling evenly, making her certain he’d pull through the night, but as she rolled off of him, and turned her head to stare at the man she’d saved once more, she wondered whether those brown eyes would open again. It was impossible to tell with any degree of certainty in either direction, and that made her more anxious than ever. 

With another groan, she pulled herself into a sitting position, and began to adjust Ben on the bed. She started by making sure his head was resting on one of the pristine white —though slightly dust covered—pillows, then moved on to removing his shoes. They were casual boots, meant more for fashion than practicality. Then her eyes settled on his clothing, which were filthy from what must’ve been days to weeks of living like a dead one. He couldn’t sleep in these. As uncomfortable as it was going to be, she’d have to get him out of those clothes. 

Swallowing nervously, she reached first for the navy blue button down he wore. The slight smell of cologne was still detectable beneath the stench of his vomit, but only just, she mused as she reached for the button closest to his neck. She worked to keep her breathing steady, moving her hands as quickly and clinically as possible over his chest as she moved down the line of buttons. If doctors could see people shirtless or naked all the time without feeling anything, then so could she. 

Eventually, she managed to get the shirt off of him, and she tossed it into the basket she’d started using as a makeshift hamper. Though she’d sworn not to, she couldn’t help the way her eyes flickered over his unclothed abdomen, and she felt a blush creep up her cheeks as she tried to distract herself from thinking about how well-sculpted his muscles were. 

Her heart started racing loud enough for her to hear her pulse in his chest as she moved on to the worn leather belt around his hips, undoing that with relative ease before she moved on to his actual trousers, and then she could feel a new bead of sweat dripping down her forehead as she undid their button. _ Focus, Rey, focus, _she thought to herself as she rolled them slowly down his hips, relieved by the sight of boxers that left plenty to the imagination, but like the rest of his clothing, were a bit dirty from the elements. 

Unlike the rest of his clothes, though, she suspected he wouldn’t be as grateful if she changed those. Guilt already riddled her from what she’d already done, even if he would probably appreciate not being left in gore-covered clothing. She left the boxers alone, and discarded the pants in her makeshift hamper before she walked over to the closet, and pulled out the robe they’d left behind for patrons to use. Without another moment’s hesitation, Rey sat down beside him on the bed, and through a combination of heavy lifting and near acrobatic maneuvers, managed to get it on him. She tied it together at the waist so that all she could see of that stupidly sculpted chest of his were the interior outlines of his pecs. 

Once she finished changing his clothing, Rey moved on to getting him under the sheets; in part because she wanted him to be comfortable, and in part because she didn’t know what would happen if she had to look at his semi naked form anymore. The dead one she’d saved just _ had _ to be attractive, didn’t he? He had to be. Couldn’t have been one of the ugliest fuckers she’d ever seen, no, he had to be good looking, she thought as she tucked him in, then turned his head to the side, placing a dusty waste basket next to him in case he threw up more of… what he’d been eating. 

With everything done, Rey took a moment to observe her patient—_ Ben _, she remembered his name was—and after taking a few heaving breaths, she walked over to the couch on the far side of the room, and collapsed onto its stiff pull-out mattress. She didn’t even bother to gather some of the pillows on the damn thing beneath her head, she simply collapsed, and propped her head up on her arm as she gave the man sleeping in her bed one last look to make sure he was still alive, before she let her eyes flutter shut. 

*

Rey woke up hours later at sundown to the sound of someone groaning loudly from pain. Her eyes shot open instantly, and she sat up bolt right on the couch, as she searched the room for the source of the sound, and found Ben curling up on his side in her bed. The events from earlier in the day flooded back to her, and she immediately rushed over to see what was wrong as his breathing grew hard, and when she reached him she noticed sweat beading on his brow, but he was still unconscious. 

Hesitantly, she reached out a hand, and rested it on his shoulder before gently shaking him. “Ben?” she asked softly. “Ben, can you hear me?”

He woke suddenly and without warning, his eyes springing open the moment she finished speaking. Rey jumped back off of the bed, and he shifted away from her in turn, both of them staring wide eyed at one another for a moment as disbelief shone visibly in their gaze. Distrust was all over his features, but as he took in her appearance and her raised hands, it gave way to confusion and curiosity. He swallowed dryly, looking as though the action gave him some difficulty before speaking. “Who…?” His voice was hoarse and rough, and even he looked alarmed at the sound of it. 

_ That made two of them. _

Ben cleared his throat again. “Who are you?” he asked, his voice still more of a croak than a smooth and solid human voice, but for the time being, it would have to do. “Where am I?”

Sympathy rang in her heart for him, and she wondered vaguely how long it had been since the last thing he—“What do you remember?”

Ben groaned again, reaching a hand up to grasp his head against whatever was aching it. “My family… I got bit… we were traveling out from Decatur… it was just a grocery run…” His already croaking voice broke as he told the story, and she could tell that while his eyes were pointed in her direction, she was no longer the object they were staring at. “I told them to leave me behind… and they did… After that I passed out and everything was… everything was so _ cold _.” 

Something about the way he said that last word sent chills running down Rey’s spine as he spoke, and she took in a deep breath. “What day was that?”

“The twenty seventh of June,” he told her, then he shook his head. “What happened? I got bit, I should’ve turned… I…” Realization dawned on him as he took in his surroundings. “I should be dead.” His breathing quickened as he stared at her, then he placed a hand over his chest as if he couldn’t believe his own heart was truly beating. “How…?”

“You were with a horde at the High Museum,” she replied, trying to tamper down the tremor that had snuck into her voice as she spoke to him. “I fought off the rest of them, but you…” Her voice was shaking too bad for her to hide it, and so was her whole body. “You m-managed to pin me to the w-wall. Y-you had me trapped. I-I was stuck. B-but… but then I… I actually…” She sniffled, then closed her eyes, finding it easier to get the words out when she didn’t have to look at him. “I bit you before you could bite me, and suddenly… in front of my eyes… you were a man again. You were alive and well, and your heart was beating. At least, it was after I effectively performed the heimlich on you.”

Once she was finished speaking, she opened her eyes to find Ben staring at her in disbelief, his own wide with amazement as he processed what she’d told him. “I was a dead one?” It wasn’t a question in the traditional sense. He knew that what he was saying was a fact; a statement above all else, but it still was so out there, so seemingly far fetched, it didn’t feel real to him. She knew what that was like, she was feeling the same way as they spoke. 

“You were,” she confirmed for him, then she stepped closer to the bed, peering down at Ben, observing how healthy he seemed to be getting by the minute. Since waking up, his cheeks had regained a rosy flush, his lips looked as though he’d eaten one too many cherries shipped in from the distant Cascades, and his hair seemed shinier, like all of the color had returned to him piece by piece since she’d bitten him. It was truly remarkable, and Rey realized quickly that this wasn’t something she could keep to herself. “This is incredible… somehow, by biting you… I managed to turn you before you could turn me.”

Ben blinked at her disbelievingly. “Why did you bite me?”

A choked laugh escaped her. “I thought I was going to die, and I figured I’d get in one last hurrah before I went—I’d go out with a bang.” She sniffled again, then shook her head before she sat down cautiously at the foot of the bed. “So I bit you out of spite.”

“So what you’re saying is… through spite alone… you’ve inadvertently found the cure for the zombie apocalypse?” he asked, his voice rising in pitch at the end as the shock of what she’d told him settled in. 

Blinking at him for a moment, Rey then burst into full body laughter, laughing so hard her sides were splitting within seconds as she crossed her arms around her waist. She bent over to alleviate the pain that brought to her abdomen. Shortly after, she could hear him start to chuckle, though if the pained grunts accompanying his own giggles were anything to go by, he was muting his reaction some due to the stress his body was still under. He wasn’t quite fully recovered yet. They wouldn’t be able to leave Atlanta for at least a few more hours, but for now, that didn’t matter. All that did was that they’d found a cure, and the world could wait a few hours while they figured out how best to distribute their knowledge. 

It took them a few minutes, but eventually, they came down from their laughter, and she sighed as she placed her hands on her knees, and nodded. “Yeah, I solved the zombie apocalypse through spite alone,” she said, then he hummed his approval, and she finally managed to look at him again just as he stared down at the clothes he was now wearing. 

“Did you…?”

“Undress you? Yes,” she replied, looking away in an attempt to hide the blush creeping up her cheeks at the memory of his well sculpted torso. “Your clothes… they were filthy. Cleaner than most dead ones I’ve met, but… still you smelled like death.”

“Well, I was dead.”

“I just thought you’d appreciate not waking up in them,” she told him with a shrug. “I… I hope that was okay?”

Ben swallowed nervously as she looked over at him, and she watched as his fingers carefully closed the robe over the gap that failed to cover his chest, which had flushed a similar color to his cheeks. “It’s fine, I… Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she replied, then she cleared her throat, and stood up off the bed, changing the subject as she made her way over to the wall on the opposite side of the room. “I’ll try and find you something else to wear from the other rooms while you rest. You can’t wear a robe if you’re trying to save the world.”

All he did in response was blink at her for a few seconds. “Wait… what?” 

“We’ve just discovered the cure for the fucking apocalypse,” she explained, gesticulating a little with her hands as her voice grew more excited. “Ben, we have to go tell people about this! We have to… we have to stop this…”

“We?”

Disappointment then understanding flooded through her, and she nodded slowly. “I understand if you don’t want to join me, but… we made this discovery together in a way. It… It may be best if we do it as a unit—as a team.” She paused, trying to gauge his reaction to that, but then his expression remained neutral, if a bit haunted. “I don’t know where we’ll go, but we have to stop this. We have to bring the world back to its feet—put it back to normal. You and I… we can be the first step back to reality.”

For a few seconds, he seemed to mull it over with himself, then he slowly sat up, grunting as he rested a hand at his side where the pain seemed to be emanating from. Rey rushed to stand by him, hovering protectively over him as she placed a hand on his back to help him sit up, and one at his side, covering his own as she asked him quietly if he was okay. His mouth opened with the intent to say something, but then his eyes locked onto hers, and she froze as they drifted down for the tiniest fraction of a second before flicking back up. “I… I’m fine,” he said, then he nodded distractedly. “Yeah, fine, and um… you’re right… we should… we should do this together. I… I-I even have an idea on where to start, if you want.”

She smiled eagerly as she pulled back from him, then she sat down by his side. “Yes! Where do you have in mind?”

“My mother’s a senator—or, she was..” At this, vague recognition came to her as she recalled his family name. The Organa-Solos had been popular figured in Georgia since Leia Organa had first run in an election. If she focused, she could even recall the image of the senator’s son, which matched that of a younger, cleaner Ben in her mind’s eye. In the present, though, she could see a surge of sorrow rush through him at the mention of his family, but he powered through it, and though his voice trembled slightly, he remained strong. “We were making our way out of our neighborhood, our home when the attack happened? But our intent was to get all the way up to Washington, D.C. We’ve been in contact with what remains of the United States government up there.”

“The government still exists?” Rey asked, bewildered that any life in a populated city existed at all. She’d always just thought she was a rare exception. “Really?”

“Someone had to shut down the borders and ensure all air traffic stopped before this spread. My mother helped make that call,” he told her, then he grasped his robe a little more tightly. “Hey, if we can make it up there, we can find resources to help spread this news. We’ll have access to what remains of the military… we could actually make a difference.”

Upon hearing _ that, _Rey didn’t hesitate to nod. “Yes! That’s brilliant, yes!” she cried, then she paused. “So you’ll join me then?”

He nodded. “Yeah, it’s… it sounds insane, but I will… I’ll go with you, and… we’ll do this together.”

At this point, Rey was practically beaming at him as she offered him his hand, and he returned a weak, but similarly happy smile as he shook it. “Then Ben Solo, let’s save the world together.”

“That sounds nice,” he replied as he let go of her hand, then he sank back into the mattress, resting his head on the muscles of one of his forearms. “But, wait...”

“Yeah?”

Another stupid grin parted his lips. “There’s one more thing I need before we ship off.”

Alarm bells threatened to go off in her head at that, but she didn’t let any traces of fear she felt show on her face as she looked down at him, and nodded. “Okay, what do you need?”

“What’s your name?” Ben asked, and instantly, any hint of fright left her body like it had touched boiling water and was escaping at velocities yet unseen by man.

Relief coursing through her, she softened as she finally, properly, introduced herself. “Rey, my name is Rey,” she told him. 

“Well then, Rey… let’s end this.”


	2. Highway Through Hell

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is getting posted today just because I want my total ao3 word count to pass the total word count of the harry potter series and literally no other reason.

They set out for the nation’s capital the next morning. Ben had passed out again shortly after they’d finished making their agreement to head north, and as a result, she’d stayed up all night to make sure he didn't die again in the darkness. Or to help if he’d needed to vomit up more of whatever he’d eaten over the past several days or weeks while he’d been dead. Luckily, he made it through without a hitch. 

Still, lying by his side all night, Rey had gotten to thinking about everything that had happened that led to their meeting. It felt like a thing of fate, like some beautiful work of destiny that had led her to choose the High Museum as a place to find her next meal, and Ben to be the one dead man she couldn’t defeat fully in a fight. If it hadn’t been her, and it hadn’t been him, could all of this really have been possible in the first place?

She had her doubts about that. How many people would’ve thought to just bite the zombie back, after all? 

There wasn’t time to think on it, though. The moment he woke up the next morning and she asked him how he was feeling, he told her he felt right as rain, and she knew the time to make their way north was at hand. Together, they packed up one of the larger vans that had been left behind in the hotel’s lower parking lot, and with one last look exchanged over the hood, the two headed out onto the road. 

“I put food in the seat behind you if you’re hungry,” Rey told him, pointing in the direction of said sustenance. 

Ben turned in the passenger seat to look at it, then he gave her a nod as she turned onto the next street leading toward the highway. “I’m assuming that we’re going to have to stop for more on the way?”

“Definitely,” she replied. “I’d be willing to bet some of the stores in the rural parts of the country still have supplies. You’ll find things in the strangest places these days.” There was a pause before she spoke again, swallowing nervously as she drove onto the highway’s entrance ramp, accelerating as if she still had to obey normal traffic laws. “That’s how I found you. I was looking for food in a vending machine.”

He hummed his response; a thoughtful look crossing his features as he stared out at the desolate city they drove past. In the months since everything fell apart, the city hadn’t changed that much in its physical appearance from the outside. Sure, on the inside it was obvious what had happened from the stragglers of the dead ones wandering the streets and the lack of living people, but just driving past downtown there was an odd sort of energy she got from it. The city was dead quiet, and even over the roar of their van’s engine she could tell it had been rendered a ghost town. 

Once a shining icon of the American south, Atlanta had completely and utterly fallen. As she made her way north out of its isolated skyline, she could only hope that Washington, D.C. hadn’t done the same. 

Shaking herself out of her train of thought, she elected to search for ways to keep herself entertained while they drove the many, many hours north to the nation’s capital. That led her to look at the man sitting in the passenger side; the concern and fear rampant behind the courage he plastered on that expressive face of his made her wonder just who he’d been before all this had happened. All she knew so far about Ben Solo was that he was Leia Organa’s son, that he’d been abandoned by his family on his own orders when he’d been bitten, and that he seemed to have something of a sense of humor. Though they’d spent a night together already, they knew virtually nothing about each other, and if they were going to save the world in a few days, she figured they ought to change that. 

“So, Ben… we’ve got fourteen hours, maybe more, to kill,” she told him, sparing him a glance as the road passed them by. “Tell me something about yourself. Something no one else knows.”

Blinking his surprise, Ben gave her a confused, but well intentioned look. “Don’t you think it’s a bit early for that sort of thing?”

A nervous laugh escaped Rey. “I don’t mean anything personal. Just… something to pass the time. Something tells me that with the way things are, this’ll take a lot longer than the half day it used to.”

His face softened at that, then he leaned back in the seat, his massive frame sinking into the black leather as he slouched like a teenager. “Um… I guess… I… I shouldn’t tell you this—I mean, we’ve only just met.”

“Well now you have to say it.”

“What are you, twelve?”

“It’s the end of the world, Ben Solo,” she explained to him, as if  _ he  _ were the one who was actually being accused of behaving like a preteen. “You have to find the joy in simple, stupid things.” Rey’s face fell as her next sentence popped into her head, and she breathed it as a heavy sigh, “Or else you start to realize how fucked up things are, and you go mad.”

Ben fell silent, and neither of them said a word as Rey switched from the interstate to a smaller highway that led them north into the city’s equally empty suburbs. Those felt just as full of ghosts as the main part of town did, and as Rey prayed for an end to the silence, it came in the form of a soft chuckle from her companion. “I like pineapples on my pizza,” he admitted after a while. “Pineapples and ham. Every chance I could get when I was at a parlor I’d get a Hawaiian pizza. They were my number one weakness and greatest secret…” His gaze fell upon her. “Until you.”

A smile blossomed on Rey’s face without her willing it to, and she adjusted her grip on the steering wheel as she nodded. “Was that so hard?”

“You haven’t offered your opinion on it,” he grumbled, as if he’d just admitted something much more revealing or embarrassing to her than his choice in pizza toppings. 

She shrugged her first response. “I’m glad you told me,” she said, then she tossed another look his way. “And I feel the same. Hawaiian is the way to go.”

A grin began to part Ben’s lips. “We might just save the world.”

“We might,” she replied, finding that she was slowly feeling a sense of kinship with the man traveling by her side. Perhaps they’d somehow make it, the two of them, and maybe, just maybe, they’d manage to save everyone from beyond the brink of disaster. 

“What about you?”

“Hmm?”

“What is there about you that no one else knows?” he asked, and suddenly her face fell. “I told you mine.”

Yes, he had, but his secret that no one else knew was cute and perhaps a little quirky while still being normal. Her secrets that no one else knew were much more depressing, and carried a weight with them that she didn’t want to burden her new friend with. He didn’t need the knowledge of the more sorrowful bits of her life so soon. Her secrets involved locking doors and hiding in the homes of the very people who were supposed to protect her; involved bruises and scars, and countless hours spent learning to apply makeup to cover them. They were not charming, giggle worthy secrets. They were darker than that. 

Ben didn’t need to know about Rey’s tragic childhood or her escape into adulthood. 

“Can we just say my secrets that no one else knows are meant for when you know me better and call it a day?” she asked quietly, then she looked over at him again, and watched as understanding drifted into his eyes. 

“I take it your past wasn’t quite as easy as mine,” he observed, and when she simply gave him a nod, he fell silent, the sounds of the highway filling the void for a second or two. When he eventually spoke again, he dropped the subject. “So what’s your favorite food then, speaking of pizza?”

She couldn’t help the smile that parted her lips. Whoever her traveling companion was, he was awkward, but just charming enough to make up for it, and she had a feeling they were starting to like one another. “I used to really love Olive Garden. That’s not a specific food, but… I don’t know. I loved stuffing my face full of breadsticks.”

“Me too,” Ben replied, then as they drove into the northern part of the suburbs toward the mountains, he prodded her with another question, crossing his arms over his chest as he spoke. “So… since we’ve got all this time to kill, what’s your favorite color?”

“Oh, I was just starting to like you, and you had to ask me that?” she asked.

Throwing his head back with a laugh, Ben’s face lit up with a happiness that surprised her given that just twenty-four hours prior, he had been dead. His flesh had been sunken in and decaying; his eyes bloodshot and unseeing, and yet now… now he was alive, and his entire body was bursting with life.  _ All because she’d been spiteful and decided to bite him first.  _ “But what  _ is _ it?”

As she hit the accelerator again, a tiny smirk pulled at her mouth, but Rey didn’t look over at the man traveling by her side. “It’s blue,” she told him, then she quirked an eyebrow. “What about yours?”

“Red,” he replied quietly, but she could feel the almost joyful atmosphere radiating from them both despite the low energy, could sense the grin on Ben’s face even without looking at him. “Why haven’t you left Atlanta?”

She had to resist closing her eyes to focus on the road. “I didn’t know where else to go,” she said, then she cleared her throat to prevent her voice from trembling. “The world was on fire, and I figured I’d use the city’s resources until they ran out, keep as low a profile as I can. It’s a good thing I did, though, otherwise we wouldn’t be here.”

A tiny smile parted Ben’s lips. “Indeed. Okay, next question.”

The questions slowly drifted from small talk into deeply personal territory by the time they crossed the Tennessee state line, and as they entered North Carolina, making their way up past Charlotte, she felt like they might’ve just known everything about one another. It was fascinating to her how quickly they’d opened up. Within hours of truly getting to know him, she felt like she was able to tell him anything and everything, and going by the intimate details of his life that  _ he  _ told  _ her,  _ he felt the same way.

By the time they found a good stopping point in the middle part of the state, they’d talked about nearly everything. He knew about the foster homes she’d stayed in and the scholarship she’d earned her freedom with, and she knew about Han Solo and Leia Organa’s neglectful parenting style. She found out that he was into classic rock, but didn’t quite hate top forty pop in spite of that and he learned that she had a secret love for Taylor Swift. From the depths to the surface, they talked about everything, and Rey started to find that for some reason, she was struggling to focus on the road. 

They pulled over in a tiny, very much abandoned town southwest of Greensboro, attempting to find refuge in one of the many neighborhoods that lined the streets paved with hot, cracking asphalt. They found it in the form of a small house at the end of a cul-de-sac. Well, it was small to Ben, at least. To Rey, the place was a god damned mansion. It was white with a classic, southern edge to the architecture that reminded her of something she’d seen back in a history class in which she’d studied the Civil War, and boasted one of those cute little swing benches she’d always wanted to have on her front porch. 

“We’re staying here for the night,” Rey declared as they pulled into the driveway. Then she reached into the seat behind her for her weapon and backpack, and gestured for Ben to get out of the car. 

Luckily, he obeyed the command without hesitation, his trust in her complete after the mere hours they’d spent in one another’s company. “Shouldn’t we check for dead ones first?” he asked, looking at the house as if it were something that were about to come alive and eat him. 

She understood why. Even if he couldn’t yet remember his time as one of the dead, Ben was undoubtedly haunted by the memory of the bite and dying alone once his family had been forced to leave him behind. With a grim look on her face, she got out of the car and stepped around it to rest a cautious hand on his arm. “We’re going to check,” she promised him, looking into his frightened brown eyes as gently as she could. “And everything’s going to be fine. We know what to do now if we’re attacked, yeah?”

Nodding slowly, Ben looked back at the house, and took in a deep breath. “Let’s go then,” he said, then he started to make his way toward the house when Rey gripped his arm a little more tightly, trying not to shudder at the electric surge the contact caused within her. “What?”

“I’m going in first.” It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t a polite request. The sentence was a command, plain and simple, and her companion was no fool; he understood their situation just as well as she did. 

He gestured ahead of them toward the house. “Lead the way.”

Giving him a warm smile, Rey dropped her hand from his arm, trying her best to erase the memory of the firm muscles she’d felt beneath his skin as she led them both into their temporary home. “It’ll be alright, Ben. You’ll see.”

*

As it turned out, she was right. Everything had gone according to plan, and the house—like all others in the neighborhood, she suspected—was empty. She and Ben were able to slip inside and set themselves up in the four bedroom—and thankfully, two bathroom—house with little effort. The only problem they had was when he attempted to claim the bed in the cleanest master bedroom she’d ever seen, and she’d had to put him in his place. With a mocking groan, her new friend slunk off to the guest room, and put a bag of his things down on his floor beside the bed with a heavy  ** _THUNK!_ **

Rey laughed at the noise as she heard the springs of the bed creaking under his weight when he dropped down onto it. Then she set down her own things on the large, king-sized bed, and made her way down the hall toward his room. When she found him, Ben was lying down on the mattress, his hands folded beneath his head as a pillow, but his eyes were open and staring right at her, a sign that he hadn’t passed out immediately. She gave him an awkward wave, then crossed her arms over her chest as she leaned against the door frame. “How are you feeling?”

He shrugged. “I’ve been better.”

“I just mean—yesterday when you came back, you were feeling a bit sick. I just want to make sure you’ve recovered,” she explained. “I’m no doctor, but if you’re hurting, I’ll do what I can to help you.”

The corners of his mouth twitched up into that oddly charming smile of his, and he shook his head. “You don’t need to do anything more for me. You’ve already done enough.”

No, no she hadn’t, and she never would. At least, that was how she felt. She would never be able to stop helping him, or anyone else that had been put in that position in front of her. It wasn’t in Rey’s nature to abandon anyone, and she sure as shit wasn’t going to stop trying to ensure Ben Solo was anything but perfectly healthy. “But are you okay?”

“I’m fine, Rey, thank you.”

“You sure?”

“A bit tired, maybe,” he admitted at last, then the switches in Rey’s brain clicked on, and she laughed nervously. 

“Ah, of course… I’ll um…” She began awkwardly backing out of the room, clasping her hands together as she went. “I’ll just let you sleep, then. Goodnight, Ben.”

“Night, Rey,” he replied, then she was gone, walking down the hall with a yawn of her own as she hoped he wasn’t just lying to make her feel better. 

It took all her strength not to turn back and look in on him again as she walked into her own, but somehow, she managed, and she forced herself into her room and toward her bed in a matter of a few seconds. By the time she collapsed onto the mattress over the top of the duvet, Rey was half asleep. Not long after, her eyes fluttered shut, and sleep took her over effortlessly, making her feel as if she were floating as she drifted into dreams without nightmares, each of them starring Ben. 

*

At some point, maybe a couple hours later, Rey woke up to the sound of his screams. In the first few seconds of consciousness, she didn’t quite realize what they were, but the moment they registered—the moment she recognized—the pure  _ terror _ in Ben’s voice, she was on her feet and running. 

Breathing fast in her lungs, Rey bolted down the slightly too long hallway towards Ben’s room, and pushed the already ajar door fully open to see him curled up into a ball on his mattress, clutching his knees as he screamed in his sleep. “ _ No! _ ” he cried, voice pleading for mercy that wouldn’t come. “ _ Nooo! Stop… please… stop _ …”

Using the moonlight drifting in through the window as a guide, she hurriedly made her way to his side, resting a hand on his shoulder and shaking him a little roughly to try and rouse him from the depths of his night terrors. “Ben?” she called out, shaking him again, but all he did in response was pant harder, a few sobs escaping his lips. “Ben, it’s just a dream! It’s not real!”

“ _ No! _ ” His shouts grew more desperate, and Rey felt panic rise as she tried harder to wake him up. 

“It’s not real!” she shouted to him, then she reached up a hand, and gently smacked his cheek, sympathy rushing through her as she felt the sweat coming off of his brow. “Ben—it’s not real, you’re safe.”

He woke with a start then, his hands grasping desperately for something to hold onto and finding only hers. Rey sniffled quietly, feeling as though she could sob with relief as his massive, warm fingers wrapped around her own, and clutched them tightly enough to cut off her circulation. The oxygen he was starving them of, though, was of little importance. All that mattered in that moment was making sure he came back to reality successfully, that he was alright. She could worry about herself in a few minutes. 

“Rey,” he gasped, clutching her a little more tightly in one hand as the other gripped her wrist. “Rey, I—”

“Shh, I’m here, you’re okay,” she whispered, reaching up with her free hand to stroke his sweat soaked hair from his face. “You’re safe. No one’s going to hurt you.”

Ben shook his head, his breath coming out in pants that were a bit too fast for her liking as he attempted to find the words to describe what had happened to him. “I— I—” A sob escaped his throat, and he buried his face beneath their joined hands. “I killed them, Rey.”

“Who?”

“Strangers… innocent people.” He gasped for air as he conjured his next sentence, and she felt wet tears spill over onto her knuckles. “I… I ate them alive.” A sniffle, then a heaving sob. “I was… I was a monster.”

Realization hit her then that his night terrors hadn’t just been any nasty nightmare, but part of a horrific, terrifying memory. “Did you remember what happened when you were dead?”

“S-some of it,” he replied quietly, his sobs slowly starting to calm as he spoke. “Not everything, but… enough that I… Rey, I was helpless in my own body. I… I fucking watched myself kill people like it was nothing. My only thoughts…” A weakened sob left his lips, the air from it warm against her skin. “My only thoughts were of food, but food was never potato chips or pizza, it was just…” He shook his head, and took a deep breath. “All I could think about was devouring human flesh—I—I wasn’t a person anymore. I—I was a monster—I am a monster.”

She shushed him again, then sat down on the bed beside him as she continued gently carding her fingers through his wavy, dark hair. “Ben, you’re no monster,” she promised him. “You’re… you’re sweet, and you make me laugh, and you made me trust you after just hours of knowing you. Do you know how hard that is?”

“Rey…”

“Listen to me—you had no control over your body. You…” Before she could finish her sentence, tears pricked at her own eyes, and a lump formed in her throat as she empathized with Ben using her entire heart and soul. “You died, Ben. You were dead. You weren’t yourself. So no, you weren’t a monster; that was something else. You? You have never been one, and you never will be. Understand?”

As the tears spilled, rolling down onto her cheek, Rey watched Ben look up at her through misty eyes of his own, understanding filling them as he nodded. “I… I understand…”

“I’m so sorry you had to remember that,” she whispered, shifting down on the bed so that she was now leaning on her side in front of him, and they were nearly face to face. In the back of her mind, it occurred to her that they were perhaps a touch too close, but she didn’t care. Propriety and platonic rules could wait until Ben wasn’t having a panic attack. “But it wasn’t you. It was never you. You’re… you’re good, Ben.”

Sniffling quietly, he released his tight grip on her hand as his breathing went down to normal. “Thank you,” he breathed, and she sighed in relief as his entire body untensed at her words. “I… thank you… for...”

“I’d do it again,” she promised him. “However many times you need.”

“I may need you a lot.” They both laughed at this, then Rey tensed, preparing herself to push off the bed, and return to her own room so they could both resume getting their full night’s sleep. 

At least, that was her intention. Seconds after she started to move, Ben gripped her arm again, but his grip was much weaker than it had been initially. “Ben?”

“ _ Stay _ ,” he begged, his eyes pleading for her to remain by his side, to not leave him restless beneath the pale moonlight. “ _ Please _ .”

She looked at him hesitantly, her breath shuddering every time it left her lungs as she weighed her options in her mind. With Ben looking at her like  _ that, _ though, she knew she didn’t have many. 

In the end, it took Rey less than a second to decide she was spending the remainder of the night in Ben’s bed. “Okay,” she told him, then she gestured to the other side of the bed. “But move over that way and turn over.”

“Why?”

“Because tonight I think you need someone to hold  _ you _ . Not the other way around.”

That logic seemed to sit well with him, and giving her one last, grateful look, Ben turned over, and scooted further away from her on the mattress until there was plenty of room for her to rest beside him. Taking a slow and steady breath, Rey shifted so that she was directly behind him, her chest pressed against his back and her legs tucked up underneath his as she wrapped an arm around his waist. As his hand came up to cover hers in their new position, she hid her face in the still slightly damp warmth of his back, and exhaled into the fabric of his shirt. 

“Better now?” she asked, hoping her voice didn’t give away the nervous sort of excitement she was feeling at being so close to him—at having him in her fucking  _ arms.  _

“Much,” he replied, his breathing evening out, then he squeezed her hand. “Thank you.” 

“My pleasure.” She adjusted herself slightly, then she sank down onto the mattress. “If you have another nightmare, just remember: I’m right here, and no one’s going to hurt you. You’re not going to hurt anyone either. You’re safe, Ben. You hear me? You’re safe.”

All she could hear for a few seconds was the sound of his breathing, then he repeated softly, “I’m safe.”

“That’s right.” She leaned forward, and rested her forehead against the column of his spine. “Go to sleep, Ben, I’m not going anywhere.”

He didn’t answer her then. Apparently as they’d been talking, he’d gotten progressively more comfortable, which was good, but it also meant he fell asleep a bit prematurely. That wasn’t exactly a bad thing either, and she was entirely too relieved that he had managed to fall asleep at all, much less so quickly. 

While listening to Ben’s even breathing, Rey allowed her eyes to slowly drift shut, and let her body relax into the mattress as she held him close. All she could think about, though, as she began to join him in the realm of sleep, was how close they’d already become. They trusted one another enough to unveil all of their secrets—even the most personal ones—and apparently, enough to ward off the nastiest nightmares in each other’s company. 

Whatever that meant, it both terrified and amazed her. She’d never felt a deep connection to a human being beyond anything she might’ve considered friendship. Before the apocalypse kicked off, she’d only had two close friends in all of history that she’d ever allowed to know anything about her. Finn and Poe had been strictly platonic—in part because the two were in a committed relationship—but Ben… It had been a day and already she could feel a bond developing between them that she’d only read about in stories. 

And that frightened her even more than the zombies. 

*

The next morning, Rey woke to the sounds of birds chirping outside, and a soft snore that somehow managed to be soothing. Apparently there were some things, some normal, domestic things, that no amount of death and destruction could destroy, and annoying birds and snoring men were two of them. 

Her eyes flew open as she processed that second thing.  _ A snoring man.  _ There was a snoring man in her bed, in specific, he was in her arms, and she was spooned tightly up against him as he slept on through the morning, oblivious to what was going on around him. She blinked her surprise at him at first, but then the night before came flooding back to her—then she remembered Ben’s screams, her mad dash into his room, his hand gripping hers, his horrific nightmare, and how sad his eyes had looked when he’d asked her to stay. 

Once the memories had completely filled in, Rey held him a little closer, as if to provide him that one extra tiny hint of comfort she knew he probably needed. In her arms, Ben hummed his contentment, and she smiled against the warmth of his clothed back as she closed her eyes against the early morning light. They could wake up later. After the night he’d had, the former dead one deserved to sleep in late. 

*

Some time later, Rey felt Ben stir in her arms, bringing them both into wakefulness as he turned onto his other side, and suddenly they were face to face, and he was holding her as much as she was holding him. An arm slung itself around her waist, pulling her right against his chest as his chin tucked itself over the crown of her head, and his lungs forced out a delighted sigh. 

After only a few seconds, though, he jolted out of his half asleep state, and his arm started to unwrap from her as he realized what he’d been doing. Scrambling her brain for something to do, Rey tightened her grip around his waist, and shook her head. “No!” she protested. “No—I… I don’t mind.”

“I—” Ben’s cheeks flushed with embarrassment, and he turned his face into the mattress as the events from the night before undoubtedly filled his mind. “I’m so sorry about—“

Rey shushed him not a second later, then she began tracing soothing circles into his back, ignoring how intimate a gesture it was. “Ben, you went through hell. You shouldn’t have been alone last night,” she told him. “I never should’ve left you alone in the first place.”

“You couldn’t have known—“

“Regardless,” she interrupted, continuing massaging gentle circles into his back. “I would gladly do it again.” She swallowed back her nerves, looking down and away from his face so she didn’t have to see whatever emotion he was projecting through those frighteningly vivid eyes of his. “Did you have anymore nightmares after I came here?”

Ben shook his head beside her. “No, I didn’t, but…” He paused, processing his own words as she looked up at him again. “I slept fine… um… thank you.”

“I used to have nightmares back in my childhood,” she told him, then she laughed at herself. “Sometimes, I think I still do. And all those nights I used to spend writhing in pain alone, I wished for someone kind to be there, to just hold me and tell me it was gonna be okay.”

“I’m—I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be; it's in the past. I’m just glad I was able to be there for you. It sort of…” she trailed off, searching for the words to say as she looked up at him. “It sort of helps me feel as if I’m making up for lost time, and you’re not half bad company.”

“Thanks.”

She gave him another grin, then shifted in his arms. “It’s getting late in the day. We should be going soon. You ready to hit the road?”

Ben nodded. “Born ready.”

A gentle laugh fell from her lips, then she slowly began to untangle herself from him, rolling over onto her back as she stared up at the ceiling. As she rested her hands over her stomach, Rey tried not to think about how much she missed his warmth, even though it wasn’t that much colder now than when she was holding him. Why was it that within a day of knowing Ben, he’d already managed to affect her so deeply? “Good, then we have to get back on the road,” she told him. “I want to get up into Virginia today, assuming we don’t run into any more hordes. We didn’t on our way out here, but… that doesn’t mean they’re not out there.”

He hummed his acknowledgement. “Do you think there’ll actually be anything up north? Or…” He trailed off, then he took a deep breath before he spoke again. “Do you think my family might be dead and we’re heading toward another wasteland?”

“Stop that,” Rey ordered him, giving him a stern, but gentle look as she sat up in bed. “They’re not dead. You can’t think like that. Until you know for sure, you have to worry only about yourself. That’s how this world works. But—even if they are dead—you’re living proof that doesn’t mean it’s over.”

Hearing that seemed to put him somewhat at ease, though a firm expression settled into his face as he too sat up in bed. “I guess you’re right.”

“I am,” she replied, then she ran a hand through her hair, and got onto her feet. “So, let’s steal what food we can and get going. We have a world to save.”

A grin rose to Ben’s face, then he followed suit, standing up and walking around to the other side of the bed to join Rey before they made their way out of the room one after the other. The mission was afoot, the world was on fire, and it was about time it stopped burning. 


	3. Nightmares by Daylight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been unofficial up until now, but here, halfway through posting the fic, I'm gonna let y'all know:
> 
> We updating on Tuesdays and Thursdays until this is over.

The road seemed to only get longer as the day passed them by. It felt as if the mountain roads went on forever, and the destruction wrought from the world’s abrupt ending made the sight even more depressing. Clothing and various metal parts of cars littered the streets—even the highway—and in some places, the bodies of the dead were sprawled out lifelessly, not even animated by whatever it was that spurred on the life of the dead ones. 

It was made even more miserable by the hot, humid southern day, since they weren't running the AC in an effort to conserve gas, and the hairs that weren’t in the scrappy bun she’d assembled atop her head were sticking aggressively to the back of her neck from sweat. Looking over at Ben, his were the exact same way on his forehead. 

Both of them were so hot and miserable, they hardly spoke, not even about where they were stopping next. Rey had planned for them to make it all the way up to DC that day, but there was something stirring deep within her gut that said somehow that wasn’t going to happen. She couldn’t explain it, she couldn’t understand it, and couldn’t begin to find the source, but somehow she was absolutely certain that danger lurked around the corner. 

In spite of the heat, Rey’s arms were coated in goosebumps as they drove past the Virginia state line. She felt as if her sweat was turning cold, as if her entire body was alerting her to something ahead that she couldn’t see, and she could only imagine what could possibly lay over the horizon. 

“You feel it, too?” Ben asked, his voice even more low and quieter than usual as he leaned toward her, whispering like there were people around to hear a forbidden secret. 

Giving him a terse nod, Rey peered over the hood of the car, staring out at the road, and listening for any sounds of danger. She couldn’t see anything, nor could she hear a damn thing that wasn’t the sound of the wind rushing past their rolled down windows. All that lay ahead was more road, and more nothing, but… that didn’t mean they were free from danger. 

As they wove between more cars on the road, Rey began to slow them down, holding up a finger to tell Ben to be completely still as she reduced their speed to a crawl, and squinted her eyes as if that would help her hear better. For a moment, all she could hear was her own heartbeat flickering in her ears, and the sound of the gentle, afternoon breeze drifting lazily by. Ben’s shallow breaths wafted into her hearing on top of it all, combining with her own to create a chorus at the most quiet level it was possible to sing. 

But beneath that chorus, as she crawled just a bit further down the road, Rey could finally hear the danger she’d been searching for. Under the shelter of all the quiet and the serenity of the empty sunshine, the moans of the dead rose up in pitch, knocking the melody off key as it continued playing ominously with every inch she moved forward. Her breath left her in a shudder as she stopped the car completely, and continued listening to the sounds of the dead on the highway. 

They were approaching fast. She couldn’t see them yet, but she knew if she kept speeding along that stretch of road, she’d find them in seconds. At best, they were half a mile away, and that was if she and Ben were extremely lucky. Given the rate the dead moved at when they didn’t think a meal was nearby, Rey estimated that they had about five minutes before the horde—going by the sound of it, a very large one—reached them, and that meant they had to think quickly. 

Without saying a word, Rey rolled up the windows, and pulled the car off to the side behind an abandoned RV. Her heart raced like something out of nascar as she put it in park, and hurriedly killed the engines before looking again into Ben’s frightened eyes, certain that hers were even more afraid. “We have two choices,” she whispered, attempting to ignore the ever encroaching horde of the dead. “Either way, we are probably going to die, but whatever we do, we have to do it fast.”

“What are we doing?”

“We can stay here and duck, pretend this is another abandoned car on the road, or we can make a break for the trees and find another car once the horde is past us,” she explained, then she shook her head. “That option is a bit more risky, though. We run the risk of seeing more in the trees, and we lose all the supplies we gathered.”

Ben thought for about two seconds, then he looked down. “Seems to me we need to stay here,” he said, then he looked around their little van, visibly searching for a good place to hide themselves until the worst was over. “Back there.” He pointed to the back of the van, where they’d flattened the seats into the floor to make room for their food. “We duck between the food, they won’t see us.”

“Good plan,” Rey replied with an eager nod, then the two of them unbuckled their seatbelts in unison, and made their way into the back of the van as the horde’s moaning grew louder. She let Ben go back first, taking one last look over her shoulder at the road before she followed him, and caught a glimpse of the first dead one as he made his way over the shimmering heat of the road nearby. 

Another full body shiver rushed through her as she crawled back with Ben, and laid on her back next to him on the floor—or rather, she tried to, after some adjustments, they both turned on their sides facing one another. Neither of them could see the windows from their positions, she knew, and so they’d have to gauge solely by sound just when the horde had passed. She knew well that it could be minutes or even hours that went by before they were free, and that every second of it was going to be the most intense one of her life. 

They were once again alarmingly close, but Rey found she didn’t care as the moans grew even louder, crescendoing in a manner not unlike a genuinely horrifying rendition of In the Hall of the Mountain King as the dead ones drew closer and closer. She’d dealt with hordes before in Atlanta, she’d seen their sheer size and strength, and what they could do to anyone caught in their path, but she’d never experienced it like this. In Georgia, she’d been up high in the skyscrapers. She had hidden from the worst of it. There had never been a moment where she was up close with a horde like this, and there was no telling how well their current survival tactic was going to work. 

For all she knew, the horde would spot Ben and Rey—would smell their living, unrotted flesh—and kill them in seconds. All she could do was hope that didn’t happen as she looked at Ben, and realized she couldn’t even hear his breathing anymore over the shuffling and moaning coming from outside. 

The horde was nearly upon them now, and Rey closed her eyes in anticipation, clenching her hand into a fist in the space between herself and Ben, waiting patiently for life or death to come and either let her carry on or take her away. Whichever it was, she had no way of knowing, but she was grateful for one thing —

She wasn’t alone. 

“Take my hand,” Ben whispered, and her eyes burst open angrily at the realization that he’d broken their unspoken vow of silence as the horde began to pass them by. 

“What?” She mouthed, then she looked between them, and saw his palm splayed out face up. 

“Take my hand,” he repeated a little more quietly, then she looked into his eyes, captured by both the fear and sense of comfort she found within the flecks of gold he had dancing in his irises. Ben was offering her his hand as a lifeline not just for her, but for himself as well. They were both frightened, they both stood the chance of not living beyond the next few minutes, and as a result, they needed one another in that moment more than ever. 

Shivering slightly, Rey took his hand, wrapping her fingers around his as she closed her eyes, and listened to the sounds of terror outside. All she could hear was moaning and shuffling feet, followed by the occasional sound of the dead clumsily running into the various objects scattered throughout the road. 

The entire time it passed, she was on edge. Her grip on Ben’s hand—and his on hers—became iron tight, and both of them clung to one another for dear life, remaining otherwise as still and cool as cucumbers. 

They only moved once the entire time, and that was when in the midst of it all, a hand slammed against the rear window of the van, and both of them flinched violently and let go of their hand hold in order to hold onto one another completely. She fought back a frightened sob as Ben’s arms wrapped around her shoulders and pulled her tightly against his chest, reassuring them both that they were alive as the dead one’s hand slid down her window with a sickening, wet creak, and the creature disappeared. 

Both of them were shaking as the rest of the horde passed them by, groaning and shuffling as they went. The sounds of their breathing felt deafening until the moment they heard the last dead one’s moans fade away into the distance. Even then they stayed down in their position, wary of stragglers or even another group that may have fallen behind the main cluster. 

By the end of it, they spent more than an hour on the floor of the van holding one another. Their muscles ached as they clutched each other tightly, their shirts balled up in their fists as they prayed to a god who just may have been listening for survival. 

Eventually, the silence had gone on long enough, and Rey’s muscles were aching from holding their tense position for as long as they had. Clearing her throat, she released her grip on Ben’s shirt, and shifted back from him slightly. An odd sense of sorrow filled her at the hurt she observed in his eyes as she moved away, then she gave him a small smile. “I think they’re gone now,” she whispered, her voice still deathly quiet. 

“I think you’re right,” was his response, but he still didn’t let go of her. 

A frown crossed her face, and she allowed her palm to spread out on his shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

“Hmm?”

“Ben, the horde’s gone, we can keep going, but you’re still holding onto me like we’re going to die at any moment.” She reached up, tilting his chin so that he was forced to look her in the eyes. “So what’s wrong?”

A shaky exhale passed over his lips, then he swallowed. “That—they—I was—” He started his sentence several times before taking a breath, and making a second, more successful attempt. “That could have been me.”

“I know, but it wasn’t.”

“We could’ve saved them.”

“Just the two of us against an entire horde? We couldn’t,” she told him, then her hand slipped down to rest on his chest, and she shuddered at the feeling of his heart beating loudly beneath it. “It takes more than two of us to take on a horde. That rule applies to both saving them as well as fighting them.”

There was another pause, then Ben nodded. “Yeah, I know… I just feel… I don’t know how to describe it other than survivor’s guilt.”

“That’s how I’ve been feeling for months,” she admitted. “I was the last living soul in Atlanta before you. I was alone and too afraid to leave to change that.”

The hand still holding onto hers tightened, and she shivered as his breath warmed the skin of her jaw. “Not anymore,” he promised her. “You’ve got me.”

Suddenly feeling as though her mouth was dry, Rey’s tongue slipped out to wet her lips. The way Ben’s eyes followed it was not at all lost on her, and she felt her heart beating like a drum all over again in her chest as a new kind of tension filled the air. When the horde had been passing them by, things had felt numbing, frozen, and utterly terrifying, but when it was just this, all she could feel was some sort of  _ pull.  _ “You’ve got me, too.”

Both of them laughed nervously, then fell completely silent as the new atmosphere in the van completely took over, and her own gaze fell down to  _ his  _ lips. She’d noticed almost immediately when he’d become human again that he had the most full, red, and beautiful lips she’d ever seen on a man, but looking at them in that moment, it had never been more true. 

As if hypnotized, Rey reached up the hand that had previously lain on his chest, and allowed it to cup his jaw as her thumb ghosted over his lower lip. In front of her, Ben shivered from the touch, his eyes closing as the part of him she was caressing trembled, and he let out a shaky breath. Within that exhale, she would’ve sworn she heard him say her name, and it had never sounded better coming off anyone’s tongue than it did his. 

As if she were being pulled magnetically, Rey began to lean in toward him, closing the already minimal space between them as her eyes began to flutter shut. Her thumb never left his lip the whole time, using it almost as a guide as she drew herself in closer. Of course, she didn’t really need to move much, since a magnet worked two ways and both of them were being pulled, Ben was working to meet her in the middle, and soon enough she could feel his warmth against her skin. 

They were both shaking as they hovered in that position; both their lips were parted, both of them were barely breathing, and both their eyes were shut, but still they were hesitating. The tension was somehow still building, still accumulating in the millimeter between them, until—

Another dead one’s moan interrupted the kiss before it could properly take off, and both Ben and Rey snapped apart with wide eyes that were filled with fear.  _ No _ .  _ No. No. No. No.  _ Not another horde. They’d been  _ so close _ to escaping; so close to making it out alive and surviving, and now…

Seeming to be able to tell what she was thinking, Ben held a finger to her lips, then he furrowed his brows, listening intently to the sound of the moans as they drew closer with an intense, focused expression on his face. Just as she was pondering what the hell it meant, relief crossed his features, and he nodded at her before lowering his voice to a whisper. “It’s just one. If it were more we’d hear the footfalls.”

“I don’t know, the others might be behind,” she reminded him, moving his hand away from her mouth. “I still don’t think it’s a good idea.” 

“It probably isn’t,” he admitted, and she caught sight of a rather charming twitch at the corners of his mouth. “But if it’s just one of them we need to try. We could save them.”

That thought tugged at the corner of her mind. They  _ could  _ save another person. Someone else could come with them to DC, and not only be alive, but stand as further proof that what happened with Ben wasn’t just an anomaly, but a real solution. It sounded like a beautiful idea, but there were still so many risks, Rey didn’t want to bother trying to go out there just yet. Not right after a major horde had just passed them by. “We can’t risk it. Not until we know they’re not a part of the rear flank.”

Disappointment flashed across his face even if she could see understanding in his eyes. While she could tell he wouldn’t fight her on the subject, a string of guilt tugged on her heart, making her feel as if the safe call was no longer the right one. What if he was right? What if it was just the one person out there? One person they could possibly save?

Steadying herself, Rey shifted back from him, and finally allowed herself to sit up in the van. Shock crossed Ben’s face, but he said nothing as she looked out the window, searching their surroundings for the source of the moaning they could still hear. After a few more seconds went by, she caught sight of a severely disheveled woman—definitely newly turned going by the pallor of her skin—in a military uniform. The camouflage was covered in dirt, and a hat sat askew on her pitch black hair, but she was still in good condition for a dead woman. 

It was the exact same situation she’d been in with Ben just two days earlier, and the more she looked at the dead one, the more she knew she had to do something. “Okay,” she said quietly, then she did one last check for others before she turned back to the first dead man she’d saved. “Let’s give it a try.”

Without saying another word to each other, they sat up, and crawled to the back of the van. There was another pause, another moment’s hesitation before Rey reached up to open the rear doors, wincing at the loud noise as she pushed them out, and slowly stepped into the daylight. Behind her, she could hear her companion’s footsteps as he walked out of the van, but she paid him no mind as their eyes fell on the creature in front of them. 

Noise attracted the dead. It was how she met Ben. It was how she’d gotten into every scuffle with a fucking zombified corpse since the apocalypse had started, and of course it was the reason that the woman in uniform was now stumbling awkwardly toward them. She had heard the sound of them leaving the van, and now she was coming to collect her meal—little did she know they were planning to get her first. 

“How do we want to do this?” Rey asked, still keeping her voice quiet as they all but tiptoed to meet the dead one. 

“Do you mean, which one of us is going to bite her?”

“That’s exactly what I mean. Do you want to do it or are you comfortable with me doing it again?”

Sparing Ben a quick glance over her shoulder, she paused as she watched him contemplate the idea. She had already saved someone. She already knew what it felt like and didn’t carry the guilt of knowing what it was like to end someone’s life and have no control over it. A victory would be nice for her, but  _ she _ didn’t need it as much as he did. Smiling gently at him, Rey nodded. “Go ahead, you do it.”

He blinked at her. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she replied, then she looked cautiously back at the approaching dead woman. “Ben, she needs us, and you need to believe you’re not a monster anymore.” Stepping aside to allow the zombie access to him, Rey gestured to her wrist. “Bite hard.”

There was another hesitant look passed between them, then he stepped forward, seeming to find his courage as he approached the woman. His hand still shook as he grabbed her wrist in his hand, ignoring her snarling and snapping as he quickly bent down and bit deep into her skin. 

At first Rey was amazed at how little time he’d wasted in biting her. Unlike what had happened in the museum, Ben wasn’t in immediate danger; he wasn’t on the brink of losing his life, but he still didn’t hesitate—didn’t waste a second of his time—in his effort to save the woman who was now howling on the street in front of them in pain. She almost grinned, but then she saw the concern in his eyes as he knelt down to her level, fear rampant in his brown irises as he watched the dead one writhe in pain on the street. “What did I do?” he asked, and there was a hint of panic in his voice that she wanted more than anything to make go away. 

“Ben, this is exactly what happened with you,” she assured him, kneeling by his side as she placed a hand on his arm. “She’ll be fine.”

Looking for a moment as if he didn’t believe her, he looked down at the woman—whose uniform indicated she’d been a lieutenant, Rey observed—and watched as the color returned to her skin. Amazement and awe filled his expressive face as his jaw parted slightly, and he almost seemed to laugh in delight as the woman coughed out a single, thick clot of whatever she’d last eaten, from her throat before collapsing and starting to breathe normally.

As the newly-revived human’s chest rose and fell steadily, Rey reached up to rest a hand on his back. “You did it,” she whispered encouragingly, running her palm over the fabric of his shirt. “You just saved her life.” 

His breathing was still shuddering a good bit, but Ben managed a laugh as the woman in front of them groaned in her unconscious state. “I… I did…”

“Monsters can’t do that, Ben,” she told him, then she reached over, letting her other hand spread out over his chest, where his heart was beating triumphantly just beneath the skin and muscle she could feel there. “You’re human, and you’ll never be anything else. Never again.”

A slight blush crept up his cheeks at the contact, but then his face grew serious. “We need to get her in the van and keep moving, don't we?”

“We do,” she confirmed, then she released her hold on Ben, and reached down to slide her arms beneath the woman on the ground. As her—partner? Traveling companion? Guy she’d nearly just kissed in the back of a shitty van?—  _ friend _ watched, she lifted her up over her shoulder in a fireman’s carry, and made her way back over to their stolen vehicle. “Let’s go.” 

Not one word was said in protest as he followed her back into the van. In fact, they didn’t say anything at all as he helped her place the woman securely on her side in the back. All she could think of as they settled her in and made sure the woman wouldn’t be too heavily jostled was what had almost happened there just moments earlier. If they hadn’t been stopped by the dead one, she knew they would’ve kissed. This was absolutely fine by her, but it had also been  _ years  _ at that point since the last time she’d kissed someone. She had been fine with that. Up until the moment they were huddled in the back of the van, she hadn’t  _ needed  _ anyone, but… there was a part of her that thought having him—in any capacity—might’ve been kind of nice. 

“You ready to go?” Ben asked suddenly, causing her to jump as he interrupted her thoughts. 

She gave him a nervous laugh as she shut the back doors to their van. “Yeah, sorry,” she replied, then she walked back around to the driver’s side, and opened the door as quietly as she could. Just because they couldn’t see or hear more dead ones yet didn’t mean they weren’t there. 

The second they were both back in their seats, she turned the engine back on, and pulled them cautiously out onto the road. It took all of her strength to pretend she didn’t notice the pieces of the dead that littered the road from their walk, but somehow she pulled it off, and soon they resumed their drive as normal. At least, it was as normal as it possibly could’ve been given what had just happened. 

They were astonishingly quiet in the aftermath of the horde’s passing. It wasn’t that Rey had nothing to say, but she was just too afraid of somehow missing the next signal that another one was incoming. They’d gotten extremely lucky with the one from earlier, but now they had another passenger and the stakes were even higher. If they got caught again, she wasn’t sure she had the energy to survive. 

A few miles into the drive, she finally turned to look at Ben, and wasn’t at all shocked to find him already looking at her. “I think we need to make another stop for the night,” she told him. “I’m exhausted.”

“We do,” he said in agreement, then he pointed to a green highway sign. “Maybe we take that next exit?”

Rey nodded as she read the signs they were passing that indicated what could be found off that exit. “Ooh, it has a Wendy’s.” 

“You craving a frosty?”

“I would kill a man for a frosty right now,” she deadpanned, then when she caught a hint of fright in Ben’s eyes, she laughed. “Not you, though. You’re too important.”

“I’m important?” he asked, sounding somewhat amused. 

“You’re the first person I saved.” She tightened her grip on the steering wheel, not bothering to put on her turn signal as she drove them onto the exit ramp. “And… you’re decent company.”

“Thanks, I try,” he replied sarcastically. “You’re not bad yourself.”

“Oh, I try harder,” she said, then they both chuckled half-heartedly, and fell quiet as they drove into the quaint, rural Virginia town, and searched for a house to call theirs for the night. 


	4. Finding the Music

Three hours later they were settled into a small little house with gothic looking architecture and a smell of spoiled food in their fridge that she wagered could kill flies.. Taking care of that odor had been a chore and a half, but they’d gotten it done, even if both of them had been forced to empty the contents of their stomachs in the backyard a time or two. 

Once it was done, though, they began the process of moving in whatever they’d need for the night. They brought in the woman they’d saved, and put her in the spare bedroom of their tiny, humble abode. It was immediately after they’d gotten her settled in that they realized the house had no other bedrooms, and they’d just given the only other free bed to this stranger. That was fine with Rey; she wasn’t sure who this veteran was, but she wasn’t sure what would happen if she and Ben took the master bedroom together. 

Or maybe—maybe she was sure and thinking about it made her just a twitch nervous. It had been a while since she’d been with anyone after all, and with the growing bond between her and the man she’d saved, she had a feeling the chances of something happening were relatively  _ high.  _ She shuddered at the thought as she walked into their bedroom again once the last of their things were settled into the house, but something told her that it was a pleasant shudder rather than one of alarm. 

Still, it wouldn’t do her any good to dwell too much on those thoughts. She didn’t have time to worry about whether or not she was going to get laid that night. 

That didn’t stop her brain from trying.

Attempting to shake thoughts of Ben, and the bed sitting behind her, Rey made her way to the interior of the room to investigate what the owner of the house had left behind. Shelves of mahogany lined the walls, each full of vinyl records, music books, and CDs. Apparently the person who once lived there had an issue with more modern technology. 

At the corner of the room, an intriguing looking record player sat gathering dust atop another shelf, and she ran her fingers over the thin layer coating the smooth surface as she made her way over to it. Unlike the rest of the items on the owner’s shelves, the device was slightly more modern. It was a battery operated player, which meant, if Rey was incredibly lucky, she could turn it on. 

For the first time in months, she stood a chance at hearing some god damned music. 

Glee surged through her at the thought, and she hurriedly searched the device for a switch to turn it on. Another wave of delight passed through her when she saw a little black switch on the side, and she hurriedly flicked it on, watching with relief as the machine buzzed to life. A little laugh fell from her lips as she stood up, and ran down to the kitchen to find Ben. She’d left him there a few minutes earlier with the intent of encouraging him to start making them—and their rescued stranger, if she ever woke up—some dinner to get them through the final leg of their journey the next day, but now, she had a new plan in mind. 

“Ben!” she whisper-shouted as she ran down the stairs, and made a beeline for the kitchen. “Ben!”

His head poked out of the door to the room she was heading into not five seconds later, and she felt another chuckle threaten to burst forth as she observed a grease smear already streaking across his forehead. “What?”

“Put down what you’re doing,” she told him as she walked into the kitchen, nearly getting distracted by the smell of the canned spam they were cooking as it spattered noisily on the stove top. “I need to show you something.”

For a moment, he looked between Rey and the spam, visibly debating whether he wanted to follow her until he shut off the gas and stepped back. The slightly aged canned meat continued crackling quietly in the background on the base of the hot pan as he turned to look at her, and crossed his arms over his chest. His biceps seemed to bulge just a bit more prominently as he shifted position, then he shrugged. “What is it?”

“We’ve been in the apocalypse for two months,” Rey said, then she reached forward, and grabbed his hand. “When was the last time you heard music?”

It took a second or two for him to understand her meaning, but when he did, his eyes went wide. “What did you find?”

“A record player,” she told him. “Battery powered and functional.” Her smile grew broad, and she felt his hand grip hers in turn. “Can we put dinner on pause and find some music to listen to?” 

“I… are you sure it won’t be too loud?” he asked, concern coloring his voice. “I don’t want them to hear it and make us the meal.”

She shook her head, then rested her other hand on his upper arm, decidedly ignoring how hard his muscles were beneath her fingertips. “We don’t have to blast it, Ben, and we shouldn’t.” Her eyes fell down, staring at the place where their hands were joined. “I can’t remember the last time I heard a single note, and I think sometimes in the world we live in, we forget that we’re still allowed to experience joy when we can. We have a moment…” Taking in a deep, shaky, nervous breath, she let her voice drop lower. “Let’s take it.”

In front of her, Ben stood almost perfectly still, and she thought for a minute that he was going to say no and go back to his cooking. Before the disappointment from that thought could fill her, however, he nodded. “Okay,” he said quietly, then he allowed her to tug on his hand, leading them out of the kitchen, and up toward the bedroom. 

If Rey’s ears registered the sound of him dropping his spatula, she paid it no mind as they walked up the stairs together, and she led him into the master space. They’d walked together in it briefly when they’d first scoped out the house and set their new companion down in the guest room, but the energy walking into the room then versus walking into it in that moment was an almost violent contrast. 

The first time they’d walked in there together, they’d been joking, laughing, and teasing about having to share a bed again. The second time, the room was charged with a sort of energy. Rey felt like she did whenever she was in a room with a bit too much static electricity floating about. It was like the feeling she got right before she accidentally shocked someone; the hairs on her arms stood on end, and she felt anticipation growing loudly in the air. Something was brewing, but going by the sunny skies outside, it was no thunderstorm. 

“It’s in the back,” she heard herself say, barely registering that she was speaking while they walked over to the far side of the room. A second later, she let go of his hand to stroll up to the player, giving him a warm smile as she opened it, then peered down to see what rested inside. 

“The Moody Blues,” Ben announced from behind her. “Days of Future Passed…” She glanced up as he walked over to her side, staring down at the record that still sat in the player. “My parents used to listen to this all the time.” 

The nostalgia that filled his voice just then almost broke her. In the tiny tremors that accompanied the final word of his sentence, she could hear so much history and heartbreak, and she rested a hand on his shoulder sympathetically as she watched his eyes grow misty. “We can listen to something else.”

“No—no—I want… I want to hear this,” he told her, steadying his voice as they locked eyes. “It’s good music.”

“Are you sure, Ben?”

“Yeah, just—hold on.” With that, he bent down, and took hold of the record in the player. She watched curiously as he flipped it over, and set it to play a specific song. Which one it was, she couldn’t tell, but she quickly caught on as the opening notes of “Nights in White Satin” began to play. 

A blush crept up her cheeks as she realized just what he’d chosen for them to listen to. The song wasn’t one she was too familiar with, but she remembered enough about it and its message that she hesitated before looking at him again. “Isn’t this… isn’t this a bit intimate?”

The world’s tiniest, amused chuckle left him, then he stepped back, and held a hand out to her. “Only if you want it to be,” he said, his voice stone cold sober as he waited for her to give him her hand. “Dance with me?”

Her eyebrows nearly shot up to the ceiling. “You want to dance?”

“You’re the one who said we should take advantage of the little moments,” he reminded her. “When was the last time you  _ danced? _ ”

She hesitated again, then as the first verse began, Rey took his hand, and allowed him to pull her back into the center of the room before twirling her into his arms. A gasp escaped her throat as she clutched his shoulder, feeling his arm wrap around her waist so that his hand rested at the small of her back, and his other one held hers while they began to sway calmly to the music. 

Internally, however, she was anything but calm. Her heart was racing from the sudden proximity to Ben, and she felt heat rush through her as he pulled her in just a bit closer. “I really haven’t danced in a while,” she warned him.

“Neither have I,” he admitted. “We’ll learn together.”

She found herself unable to stop the smile that parted her lips, and as they began to sway anew, she noticed just how charming the one on  _ his  _ face was. Of course, when she started staring at his full lower lip, Ben noticed. His breathing stuttered in front of her, and both of them shivered as they averted their eyes back up. “Sorry,” she breathed. “I was… distracted.”

“So was I.” He adjusted his grip on her back, lowering his hand slightly so she could feel its warmth on the top of her ass. Another shiver threatened them both as he cleared his throat, and nervously spoke again. “And um… I don’t know how to approach this, but earlier in the van… I thought…” A nervous laugh shook his broad chest, then he steadied himself. “I thought you were about to kiss me.”

Rey wasn’t sure how it was possible, but she wagered she was more nervous than he was when she nodded. “I was,” she admitted. “I wanted to.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did you want to?” he asked, looking down at her like he couldn’t believe she was real. “Why did you try to kiss me? Was it because you thought we were going to die, or—or was it something else?”

The conversation wasn’t going where she was expecting it to go, but Ben’s questions were so genuine, so concerned that she didn’t feel uneasy or as awkward as she thought she would from that sort of subject. Instead she felt peaceful and perfectly content and comfortable answering him honestly. Earlier she’d been nervous about the potential for what might happen in that bedroom, but her anxiety was out the window just looking into his eyes. “It wasn’t just because we were going to die.” To her astonishment, her voice didn’t tremble with the confession, and with her newest internal revelation, she found it easy to keep going. “I’ve felt… I don’t know—drawn to you since we met. From the moment you woke up and we talked, I could feel something there. At first I thought it was just platonic, but… I think that was a naïve assumption.”

“How come?”

“No one looks at someone platonically the way I catch myself looking at you.” She leaned in a little closer to him, catching sight of the gold in his irises again as she moved. “And you’re sweet, impossibly kind in spite of what you’ve been through, and you’re not a half bad cuddler.”

They both laughed at this, then Ben sighed as he pulled her closer, forcing her to have to tilt her head up to look at him as they talked. The song in the background was long forgotten, a flute solo drowned out by the next words he spoke. “Then that leads me to one conclusion.”

“What conclusion is that?”

“There’s no horde to interrupt us now. There’s nothing stopping us from picking up where we left off.”

She quirked an eyebrow at him, her voice gaining a somewhat flirty edge as she let herself stare openly at his full lips. “Are you saying you want to kiss me?”

“I want to kiss you more than anything,” he admitted. “At least once. I want to know what it’s like.”

“Then do it,” she told him, laughing at her own boldness. “In a world like this? How much time do we have? We don’t know if we’ll ever know what it’s like to be close to someone again. Much less someone we like.”

Ben shivered in her arms, but moved a bit closer to her. “But it’s not just time is it?”

“It’s not just time,” she promised him, then she shifted her hand up from his shoulders to his neck, cupping the base of his skull in her palm as she leaned in even closer, feeling the ghost of his touch on her lips. There must’ve been a scant millimeter of space between them as she let out another shuddering breath. “I want you, but only if you want me too.”

Another nod. “I do,” he told her, then Ben tugged gently on the small of her back, then his lips were finally on hers. The moment from the car hours earlier finally saw resolution as those warm, full, red lips met hers in the middle, trapping her own between them as he kissed her suddenly and passionately. It was as if the electricity in the air finally produced lightning, crackling beautifully and violently as the thunder echoed across a landscape she envisioned in her mind. 

In spite of the storm brewing within her, he kissed her softly and slowly. His kisses were astonishingly gentle, those sinful lips parting and coming together with her own in a perfect rhythm that had her head spinning in tandem with feeling like everything was perfectly clear. The apocalypse was waging a war against life around them, but the room had disappeared—the  _ world  _ had disappeared—so that there was nothing but her and Ben. There was nothing but them and their immediate surroundings, and Rey absolutely melted into it all. 

It was enough to carry her into eternity, but somehow, she still wanted more, and for once, she allowed herself to have it. Her hands abandoned their position to slide up to his shoulders, and she slowly slid the jacket she’d let him borrow in the hotel that first morning they spent together down his arms. He hummed his surprise, but didn’t protest as he took it off the rest of the way once she reached his elbows, and threw it off somewhere into the abyss that didn’t exist around them. 

Their lips never parted as she ran her hands down the muscular expanse of his chest, reaching for the hem of his shirt in desperation to feel more of the warmth radiating off of him. In a time like this where death and destruction reigned supreme and vacated the land of its own vital signs, she needed to feel  _ alive.  _ She needed to remember that there was someone else out there in the darkness—that someone’s heart was beating as quickly as hers as she slowly slipped her hands beneath Ben’s shirt. 

Luckily, he seemed to be on the same page, and he finally broke their sweet but heated kiss to lift his shirt up and over his head, and let it fly off somewhere into the space that no longer existed. He then placed his hands at the hem of her own shirt, and quirked an eyebrow to silently ask her for permission to remove it. “Go ahead,” she whispered, then her shirt was being lifted in front of her vision, obscuring her view of him for a second before it too disappeared into the unknown. 

The second both their shirts were gone, their lips met again in the middle, but this second kiss carried a lot more fire with it than the first. Rey moaned as they kissed, Ben tilting her head back with one hand while the other pressed into her lower back, pulling her into him as he began to search upward for the clasp of her bra. In spite of the warmth provided by his body heat, another shiver shook her as his fingers found it, and undid the hooks that supported her chest. 

Their kiss didn’t break as she reached up to slide the straps from her shoulders, and let it fall limply to the floor, crumpling quietly on the ground in a pile before she kicked it away into the void the rest of their clothes had disappeared to. After that, the kiss only grew more intense; Rey’s arms wrapping around Ben’s neck, her fingers carding through his hair as she kept him as close as she could in her arms. She needed to feel him, to feel the touch of another human being after having been starved of it for so long. She needed all of him and knew he needed all of her in turn. Both of them had been alone for too long, and the change was long overdue. 

She gasped into the kiss as his arms wrapped around her waist, and she was suddenly being lifted from the ground. Instinctively, she wrapped her legs around his waist, feeling the denim of her jeans stretch uncomfortably as his hands shifted their position to ensure she didn’t fall. Warm palms splayed out over her back, his lips promising her without words that she would be fine—that they would  _ both _ be fine—with every brush against hers. It was the safest and the most at peace she’d felt in months, and for once, she knew without a shadow of doubt that she would make it through the night. They both would. Now that they had each other, nothing was impossible. 

Needing air desperately, Rey pulled back from the kiss, panting hard as she rested her forehead against Ben’s, and snickering quietly to herself when she realized he was breathing just as hard as she was. As her eyes slowly fluttered open, she realized that both of them were smiling through their kiss swollen lips, that both of them had found equal amounts of joy in the heat of undressing one another, and if they’d felt the same way about  _ that… _

“We don’t have to go any further if you don’t want to,” Rey told him, offering him an out just in case there was any small part of him that didn’t want to do this. If he gave even the slightest hint that he wasn’t completely in, then she wasn’t either. “We can just lie down and hold each other, or do nothing at all.”

“No,” he replied, shaking his head as he pulled back from her, and she caught sight of his darkened irises and flushed cheeks. “No—I want you. Right now.” he adjusted his grip on her back, making her realize how precarious her present position was if she wanted to maintain some semblance of stability. “I need to feel something. I need to feel  _ you. _ ”

Rey’s breath caught in her throat, then she licked her lips, narrowly hiding the smirk that threatened them after she caught Ben’s eyes drifting down to watch. “Then put me down on that bed,” she leaned forward, letting her lips brush over the skin of his ear as she spoke, “and fuck me.”

This time, it was Ben who shivered, and satisfaction welled within her, releasing itself in the form of a loud, involuntary, “ _ whoop!” _ as he whirled her around, and she felt him take the steps over to the bed in three long strides before he stopped, and slowly began to lower her down onto it. 

Her back met the mattress as softly as Ben was able to manage it, and as he settled in over her, she adjusted her grip on him to account for their new position, waiting until he was perfectly wrapped within her legs before she pulled him in for another kiss. He hummed against her lips, then she felt one of his hands begin to skim up the curve of her waist, brushing over the slightly too tight skin of her rib cage on its journey up. 

A curse tumbled from her lips, breaking their kiss for a moment, as his fingers gently made their way over the swell of her left breast, and her nipples hardened instantly at the touch. A soft moan escaped him as he felt the effect he had on her, and a similar but restrained noise left her throat in response as he took it between his fingers, and rubbed gently at the stiff peak. “God, Rey,” he breathed, breaking the kiss to start pressing his lips everywhere else on her body, starting with her cheek. “You’re beautiful.”

She gasped for air as he began trailing his kisses lower, and pressed them gently to the side of her jaw before descending along her neck, sucking marks there as his hand moved over to the nipple he’d previously neglected. Everywhere they touched her, his lips were astonishingly soft, and so much more gentle than she ever could’ve asked for. Each kiss drove her more insane than the last, and by the time he finally reached her collar bone, she felt as if her control was slipping, and she was about to become an utter mess beneath him. 

When his lips found their way to her chest, though, that was when she prayed the walls of the house were soundproof as a loud, involuntary moan escaped her throat. Her breathing grew ragged, and she found herself trembling a little beneath him as his kisses landed on the pebbled skin of her nipple, teasing her for a moment before he took it into his mouth, and swirled his tongue around it. If she’d lost all sense of self control, she would’ve writhed beneath him, but she maintained her composure, offering a few quiet curses instead as she adjusted her hold of his hair, and lost herself to the feeling of his mouth on her skin. 

As if he’d only just remembered it existed, Ben brought his other hand into the space between them, and felt for the waistband of her jeans. Not wanting to be completely useless, Rey reached down one of her own to help him, undoing the button and zipper then as swiftly as she could with her shaky hand. Then, she returned it to his hair, holding him close against her breast as he touched her in the way she’d longed to be touched for months. 

Without her having to ask, he released the first nipple from his lips, and moved on to the second, driving her crazy in the exact same way as his hand began to slide her jeans down her hips. Waves of pleasure surged through her as she lifted them off the bed in an effort to help him relieve her of another item of her clothing. Soft giggles escaped them both as he struggled a little in tugging them—and her underwear—down over the swell of her ass, forcing him to break away from her chest to focus his attention on removing her remaining clothing. 

“End of the world doesn’t make this any easier,” he muttered, causing her to laugh again as he finally tugged them off of her, and discarded them somewhere in the abyss before crawling back over her, and leaning down to kiss her. Much to his surprise, she put up her hands, stopping him before his lips could reunited with hers. Immediately, concern filled his eyes. “What’s wrong?” 

“As much as I’d love to spend hours just kissing you senseless… we’re a bit uneven at the moment.” She let a hand wander down, gliding over the expanse of his muscular back until she reached the waistband of his jeans, allowing her fingers to wander over his ass before giving it a teasing little squeeze. A groan escaped him at the touch, and pride swelled within her as she gave him a sly grin. “These need to come off.”

He looked at her like she’d just given him the sun. “Rey,” he breathed, but he was obeying her command the moment the word tumbled from him, and she laid back casually on the bed as she watched him struggle to unbutton his jeans. His hands were shaking as he finally succeeded, and she sat up as he too divested himself of his remaining clothing, resting a hand on his shoulder once his own jeans were finally abandoned to the floor. 

“Are you nervous?” she asked hesitantly, running her thumb over a little mole she found resting over the hard surface of a muscle.

He chuckled as he glanced at her, smiling a tad crookedly as he shrugged. “I think anyone would be nervous to be naked in front of you,” he admitted, causing a blush to rise up Rey’s cheeks as he rested a hand on one. “And um…” Ben cleared his throat, scratching the back of his head as he spoke again, “Rey, what about protection?”

_ That _ she had an answer for. “I have an IUD,” she said, then a slightly terrifying realization hit her. “Ben… I’ve got a few years left before it expires… but, there are no doctors around anymore and—”

“No,” he interrupted her, then he wrapped an arm around her waist, pulling her close to him as he spoke, “No, you’ll be fine, I promise.”

“How do you know?”

“We’re going to the capital. If I’m right, there should be hundreds, if not thousands, of people there. Odds are, one of them will be a doctor. Okay?” His eyes had never seemed more worried as they looked into hers, and she nodded slowly. 

“Okay,” she replied, then she leaned forward, and kissed him again,wrapping an arm around his shoulders as she pulled him back down onto the bed with her. This time, he lay down beside her, and for a while they stayed there like that; cautiously exploring one another’s mouths and sharing little touches that both had them aching for more as the time passed. 

Eventually, Rey pressed on Ben’s chest and broke their kiss as she pushed him back onto the mattress. Shock then understanding filled his eyes, and the corners of her mouth twitched up as she swung a leg over his hips, to rise up so that she was straddling him. Her heart was racing in her chest, and she thought it might’ve been beating faster than it had when they’d survived the horde, but she didn’t want to debate that right then. She didn’t want to think about the horde ever again. 

Looking into his eyes one last time to see if he was sure about this, Rey reached down between them, then she took his erection in her hand, and stroked him slowly, lazily a few times, while watching with satisfaction as his head fell back to the pillow, but his eyes never left hers. Not letting go of the hold she had on his cock, she continued her gentle ministrations as she leaned down, and pressed a featherlight kiss to the skin of his chest, their gazes firmly locked the entire time as she sat back up, and took a shaky breath. 

It occurred to her in that moment that she was now the nervous one, but she paid her nerves as little attention as possible as she positioned him at her entrance, and slowly sank down onto him. As she gasped from the feeling of him becoming sheathed within her, Ben’s hands crept up her thighs, positioning themselves on her waist as his breathing stuttered, and his eyes closed from pleasure. Both of them shook as she settled over him, seating herself on his cock until she knew she’d reached her limit. 

In the brief pause between when she stopped and started moving again, the man beneath her shifted ever so carefully so that he was sitting up, and his arms were wrapped around her waist as he pressed a gentle kiss to the junction of her neck and shoulder. She hummed at his touch, running her fingers through his hair before taking it in a fist, and claiming those lips with hers as she began moving over him. Both of them moaned into the kiss, but neither of them broke it. They were too lost in the feeling to consider parting for anything, not even air, and  _ fuck _ if that alone didn’t threaten to make her come early as she rode him at a steady, even pace.

Of course, their lungs had other opinions, and a few seconds later, they broke apart as Rey picked up her pace, and Ben tightened his arms around her as she moved, and she heard him whisper her name once more. She gave him a small hum of approval as she ground onto him a little harder, causing him to swear loudly, before she rested a hand on his chest. “You can be loud, you know, I don’t think anyone will hear you.”

“Except maybe our guest,” he replied, then he bucked his hips up into her, and she gasped as he gave her a cocky grin. “So are you sure you want me to be loud?”

“God, yes,” she breathed. “Just keep—keep touching me, like you were earlier, and don’t stop.” She leaned in close to his ear, slowing her pace on his cock as her lips moved over the skin there. “If you’re going to be loud, then so will I, but only if you earn it.”

His entire body shaking, Ben moaned low and deep, then he fisted a hand in her hair, and pulled her back into him for another kiss before rolling them over so that she was on her back, and he was on top again. How he did it without injuring one or both of them, she didn’t know, but she didn’t care. The first thrust he gave her as he pulled away from her lips had her gasping into him, and she found she had no protests about their change in position. Her breath came out in pants as he began to move faster inside of her, and she clutched him more tightly, meeting him thrust for thrust. 

“Fuck, Rey,” he whispered, then she felt him tremble again, and she watched as he bent down on another thrust, pressing a second kiss to her shoulder as he reached a hand between them. Confusion filled her at first, but then his thumb began to circle her clit, and she gave him a breathy, delighted laugh that devolved into a moan as waves of pleasure surged through her. 

A staggered cry left her throat, emanating from deep within her gut as her head tilted back, allowing Ben’s lips access to her throat that they didn’t quite have before. He didn’t hesitate to take advantage of the open space, and he descended on her neck immediately, peppering kisses along the length of it as he continued fucking her like it was what he’d been born to do. His name left her so quietly she wasn’t sure he heard it, but as he pressed another, lingering kiss to the column of her throat, he gave a small laugh and pressed into her a little more, causing her back to arch off the mattress.

It was then that she realized she was starting to get close; the feeling of her impending orgasm coiling tight within her lower abdomen. “Ben, I’m close,” she warned him, then he pulled away from her neck, and she could see his eyes illuminated by the daylight still trickling in through the windows. 

The first time she’d seen them, his irises had been red, bloodshot from weeks of death and decay as his body fell apart on itself, but failed to completely shut down, trapping him in the cruelest way possible. Now though, now she could see them full of life; now they shone, dark brown with contrasting tiny, little embers of gold that looked at her with an adoration she hadn’t ever known from another human soul. The monster he had once been was nonexistent. The zombie was dead, Ben Solo was alive, and as long as she was by his aide she vowed never to let that change. 

“Come,” Ben said softly, bringing her back to reality with the low rumble of his voice. “I’ll be right behind you.”

Rey gripped his shoulders tightly as he sped up his thrusts again, and the thumb on her clit grew erratic in its movements, letting her know that he too was getting close. “Ben… Fu—“ She didn’t have time to finish her sentence, before she came with a loud, stuttered shout. Everything became fuzzy around her—sight, sound, and feeling—as Ben continued fucking her through her orgasm. A vague part of her registered his own loud cry, and distantly she felt him come inside of her, but she was still too lost in her own haze to notice. 

In the past—whether by her own hand or someone else’s—it always seemed to pass her by all too quickly, and was over within seconds leaving her feeling like she’d been robbed of something greater. With him, though, she felt like she came for a small eternity. His name tumbled from her without even needing to think it, and from his lips she could hear her own followed by a chorus of curses and moans as they rode it out together. 

As she came down from her high, one of Rey’s hands fell down from his shoulders, landing lazily on the pillow by her head. It was soon joined by one of his, which ceased lazily stroking her clit to lace his fingers through her own, and he held onto her as if she would disappear from sight if he let go. Both of them were panting hard, both equally bereft of oxygen as they finally laid still, and stayed there for a moment basking in the afterglow of what they’d just done. 

After a while, one of his hands reached up, and he brushed a stray, sweaty strand of hair out of her face before lowering his lips to hers in a short, but heated kiss. She didn’t quite let him pull away, though, and she took his hair in her free hand, pulling him back down to her and capturing his lips again as he let out a surprised hum. Both of them snickered quietly into the kiss, but soon found their rhythm, losing themselves again in the afterglow as the minutes passed them by. 

Still she knew they’d have to get up eventually. Dinner was still waiting for them to cook it and they needed to be sure the soldier they’d rescued was still alive. Though it just about broke her to do so, Rey eventually pulled away from the kiss. A soft groan of disapproval escaped the man in bed with her, and she laughed as he pulled out, and rolled over onto his back. “Sorry to end things so suddenly,” she said, shifting onto her side as she began to stroke the skin of his upper arm. “But we have the rest of the day to lie in bed together, and…” As if on cue, her stomach growled, ensuring the tranquility of the moment was completely and thoroughly dead. “And I need dinner.”

“Ah, yes, the spam beckons me,” he muttered sarcastically. 

Aching laughter shook her chest, and she curled in on herself as the feeling grew joyously painful. “Ben, it’s not that bad.”

“It’s that bad,” he deadpanned. 

“Well, we don’t have Wendy’s anymore,” she reminded him, then she patted his arm, and sat up. “Come on, let’s put our clothes on and try to make this taste good.”

Another groan, but he didn’t protest otherwise as he crawled off of the bed, and stood up, offering Rey a rather fantastic view of his ass as he walked around the room, and began picking up his clothes. Remembering that she had things to do, she forced herself to stop staring at it, and began to make her way onto her feet to find her own clothing. 

“Wait,” Ben protested suddenly, holding up one hand as he struggled to do the zipper of his jeans with the other. 

“What?”

“I just…” He paused, rubbing absentmindedly at the back of his neck as he stared at her, his eyes raking appreciatively down her naked body. “You’ve done everything for me, and I… I want to return the favor.” Giving her a small, boyish smile, Ben stepped forward again until he was standing at the foot of the bed, then he leaned down, and placed his hands on either side of her legs so that his face was mere inches from hers. “Let  _ me _ make  _ you _ dinner. Let  _ me  _ check on the soldier. I’ll take care of everything, you just get some rest and…” He looked her up and down again. “Don’t put your clothes back on.”

She snorted her amusement. “Why not?”

“Because after eating that garbage, I’m going to need something to get rid of the taste,” he told her, his eyes dropping low between her legs. “And I want to taste  _ you _ .”

Shivers ran down Rey’s spine, but all Ben gave her in response was a small wink, then he left the room, closing the door on his way out. Feeling thoroughly heated again, Rey collapsed against the mattress, breathing hard as she thought about the man in the kitchen, and about what he had just promised her. Her pulse thudded in her ears as she envisioned his lips, picturing them red, full, and kiss swollen as they were when he’d promised he was going to go down on her. A soft whimper escaped her at the thought of those lips between her legs, and she forced herself to lie still, waiting patiently for the moment he would return with their food and they could finally enjoy a decent meal. 


	5. Clean Street

By the grace of the god she’d thought had abandoned them, their luck didn’t run out until after he’d done as he promised. It wasn’t until after Rey had come apart beneath his tongue, until he’d tasted her come on his lips and wiped his mouth in the most lewd, obscene way she’d ever seen that they finally ran out of luck. 

Even then, by the standards of bad luck they’d had thus far, this was nothing. It happened as Ben was pulling off of Rey, just after he’d wiped himself clean and watched her as she panted beneath him. That was when they heard the distant sound of a groan from down the hall, and at first they both froze, paranoid that the sounds they’d made had attracted the dead. It took another second of listening for them both to realize that the noise had not come from someone whose flesh was decaying, but rather from someone who was alive and well. 

_ The soldier.  _

Both of them were on their feet in seconds, haphazardly throwing on their clothes as they raced to get to the woman they’d rescued. Rey remembered how terrified Ben had been when she’d first brought him back into consciousness. It was a terror she wouldn’t forget seeing anytime soon, and whoever it was that they’d rescued didn’t deserve to be alone through the process. 

In her rush, Rey forewent her bra since she was unable to find it, and threw on her shirt instead as she and Ben hurried to escape from their bedroom. Once they were clothed enough to be presentable, they gave each other the world’s fastest once overs, and immediately ran out into the hallway to find her. 

When she walked into the guest room, relief filled her that the woman was still waking up, still struggling to blink against the sunlight as she tried to figure out her surroundings. Instantly, Rey rushed to her side, and sat down on the bed beside her. “Listen, I know this is terrifying, but I need you to stay calm,” she said, then she took a deep breath, and gestured for Ben to sit on the floor beside the bed. “You’re alive, and you’re safe.”

Slowly, the woman’s eyes opened, revealing a pair of still slightly bloodshot brown irises that looked at her from beneath a pair of hooded eyes. “Who…” her voice croaked like Ben’s had when he first woke, and she cleared her throat before trying again. “Who are you?”

“I’m Rey,” she replied, giving the soldier a warm smile as she held out her hand. “And this is Ben. What’s your name?”

“Rose.” She grunted as she sat up slowly, and shook Rey’s hand, then Ben’s. “Rose Tico.”

“I’d say it’s nice to meet you, but given the circumstances…”

Both women and Ben laughed, then the faces of all three fell in perfect tandem as Rose looked between the two of them curiously. “And what are the circumstances? Is this… is this hell? Is this the afterlife?” Panic began to show itself on her face as she suddenly rolled up the sleeves of her military jacket, and exposed the skin of her arms. “I… I don’t understand…” She looked up at Rey in alarm. “I was bitten, I should be dead.”

“About that…” Rey began, then she looked over at Ben, and together they explained to Rose just what had happened to her. In turn, the soldier explained to them how she’d wound up bitten. 

The woman they rescued had been a part of a border guard attempting to keep the infestation out of the state of Virginia. For the first three days, it had almost worked. After that, all it had taken was one foolish asshole hiding a bite behind the barricade, and the whole thing had come tumbling violently down. Rose had fallen after she’d run out of bullets, and instead of fighting the horde she’d charged forward, running through them and getting bit left to right until they abandoned her as a feverish heap on the roadside. 

The last thing she remembered before waking up in front of Rey was a vivid and sparkling night sky. 

“What about you two?” Rose asked, sniffling as she finished speaking. “What’s your story?”

Rey and Ben looked at one another, then he spoke up, grasping one hand in the other uncomfortably. “We came up from Atlanta,” he started, then he swallowed nervously as his eyes locked onto hers. “We met when I tried to bite her in the High Museum. I used to be like you, but then I ran into Rey, and I… I became patient zero.”

“So we’re all strangers then?” 

“Sort of,” Rey replied, feeling a blush creep up her cheeks as she suddenly avoided Ben’s gaze. “We’ve been traveling on the road the past few days, and when there’s no one else alive… it brings you close.”

Rose Tico, though, was no dumb ass. “You mean you thought you were the last two people on Earth so you had sex?” she deadpanned. 

“Not quite,” Ben replied, snickering under his breath as the crimson on Rey’s cheeks undoubtedly grew more prominent. “But close enough.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, we’ve been trying to make our way north into D.C. My mother’s a senator, so that’s why my family was heading north. Last time I was with them in Decatur we got signal through to the capitol, but… I don’t know if you’ve heard anything from up there…”

The woman in front of them scratched her head, then nodded, sending relief flooding through Rey’s veins. “It's only been three weeks for me, but we were in regular contact with the surviving government in Washington before the dead overtook the barricade.” 

“You’re serious?” Rey asked, not wanting to allow herself to become too hopeful too quickly. “The actual government? Not just some small band of survivors?”

“The actual government,” Rose confirmed. “Half the senate and a third of the House is still intact. Last I checked they were in charge and working on a distribution of resources to try and aid surrounding states.”

Another look passed between her rescuers, and Rey dared to allow herself to start thinking that maybe that dream they’d been chasing was becoming a reality. Maybe there was a world beyond this. They could spread their knowledge of the cure in mass amounts, and start actually living their lives instead of surviving. She would get the chance to explore more of the connection that existed between herself and Ben, and they would stand a chance at being more than just a one time thing that the universe had been kind enough to allow her for one night. 

“Then it’s worth a shot to finish the drive,” Rey told Ben. 

“My family might be up there…” he replied absentmindedly, then she reached across the space between them for his hand. “My parents… I don’t know what they did after I was gone.”

“I’m sure they made it, Ben. I doubt they would’ve wanted to let you down,” Rey assured him. She wanted to say more, but everything she was thinking involved the intimate details they’d told one another about their lives, and while Rose seemed like a sweet woman, disclosing all of this to her right after she woke up seemed like a bad idea. With that thought in mind, she turned to their new friend, and gave her a kind smile. “So then tomorrow we’ll finish our journey and tell whatever remains of our government up there that there’s a cure. Tomorrow we stop the apocalypse.”

The other two nodded slowly, then Rey stood up off of the bed. “We should all get some rest. It took this one another night’s sleep to get ready for the road,” she said, then she pointed to a nearby walk in closet. “I saw some women’s clothing hung up in there if you want something clean to wear. That uniform can’t be comfortable to sleep in.”

“It’s not,” Rose promised her. “Thank you.”

“And just shout down the hallway for us if you need anything.” Rey rested her hand on the door knob, then glanced at Ben and cocked her head in the direction of the aforementioned hall. “Let’s go.”

“So bossy,” Ben grumbled sarcastically, causing both Rey and Rose to laugh as the former of the two opened the door. “But okay.”

More giggles falling from Rey’s lips, she wished their new guest a good night, then made her way from the room, waiting until Ben closed the door to reach out for his hand. “Come on, we have a long day tomorrow,” she said, then another warm smile crossed her face as he took her hand. Their fingers laced together, then they made their way down the hall, ready to begin the longest day of their lives when the sun rose again. 

*

The next morning, the three ate the world’s fastest breakfast. They dubbed it so because they made it by simply tossing whatever fruits they had in their stock together in coffee cups they stole from their temporary abode and immediately departing after. Within about fifteen minutes of waking up, they were on the road, and finally on the final stretch—assuming they didn’t run into another horde—to Washington. Victory was only one hundred and fifty two miles away. 

They remained silent for the first stretch, none of them saying anything until they saw another road sign announcing the remaining distance to the capital. It was then that one of them finally said something, and the reality of what they were facing began to hit. What if they made it to Washington and it was just a barren wasteland like Atlanta? What if nothing was left of the place it had once been, and it too had fallen?

“What if they didn’t make it?” Ben asked suddenly, interrupting the next thought she had before it could fully form. 

She knew what he was talking about without him having to elaborate. The entire time they’d been journeying north, Ben had been concerned for his family. Even with what she knew about how distant he’d been from them growing up, she knew how important it was to him for his family to know he was still alive. After a second, she reached a hand down from the steering wheel to hold his. “They’ll be there,” she promised him, knowing full well that might not have been a promise she could keep. 

“But what if they didn’t make it? They could’ve been taken out by the same horde we met.”

“Ben, they could have,” she admitted, squeezing his hand as the road began to curve, and she adjusted the steering wheel accordingly, waiting until they straightened out again before she continued. “But we won’t know that until we get there. For now…” Rey swallowed, steadying her grip on his hand and the wheel. “We need to have hope.”

A small, surprised sounding hum came from deep within his throat, and she spared him a glance, watching the way his lips twitched. “My mother used to say something like that,” he told her, fiddling with the cuticle on the thumb of his free hand as he spoke. “She said, ‘Hope is like the sun, if you only believe in it when you can see it.’”

“You’ll never make it through the night,” Rose finished from behind them, then Rey watched in the front mirror as she leaned forward, and propped her elbows on her knees. “You weren’t kidding, your mother really is the senator.”

Ben grunted lightly in acknowledgement, then he sighed. “I just hope that the present is the correct tense for that verb.”

Rey nodded as she let go of his hand. “Me too,” she told him, then she pressed her foot down a little harder on the accelerator. “Just under an hour until we reach city limits.”

“Oh thank god,” Rose replied, then the two women shared a nervous laugh while Ben remained eerily silent. 

If the man sitting beside her thought she hadn’t noticed the way he was now looking out the window rather forlornly; he was mistaken, but Rey didn’t call him out on it. Instead, she simply carried on down the road, guiding Rose into an easy conversation about her life in the time before the dead as they passed the remaining time to Washington. 

*

When they first arrived in the suburbs of Washington, it looked as tragic as Atlanta. Buildings were dilapidated or completely destroyed. Some looked as though they’d been burnt, and others simply had a glass window or two broken. Each one though looked as if it had been through hell. 

_ That  _ didn’t bode well for the sense of hope she’d been hoping to instill in Ben, and as she looked over to see his reaction to the suburbs, she felt her heart break to see him white knuckles as he stared out the window. His face had blanched of all color, and he was pale as a sheet as he watched each house or store go by, and saw no signs of life even as they drew close to the main part of the city. 

“This means nothing,” Rey assured her passengers. “This is just the outside.”

“Yeah, the border I guarded looked like this from the outside,” Rose piped in, her voice perkier than it probably should’ve been given the situation. “The inside was perfectly safe.”

“Your border fell,” Ben whispered quietly, his voice sounding utterly broken as they drove on through the remains of a once patriotic and powerful city. 

Neither Rose nor Rey spoke in the aftermath of his comment, both too lost to the sea of destruction around them. Just like Atlanta, bodies littered the ground, and various debris blackened or turned their surroundings crimson and dark brown with old blood stains, but there was something noticeably different about the suburbs of D.C. What it was, she couldn’t quite put her finger on it yet, but something was off in a very, very good way. 

“What’s on your mind?” Rose asked her after a while. 

“Hmm?” 

“You’ve had this concentrated look on your face for the last five minutes,” she explained, resting a hand on the back of Rey’s seat. “You’re looking for something, aren’t you?”

“I am.”

“What is it? I can help.”

Taking in a slow breath, Rey pointed to the road ahead of them. “There’s something weird about this road,” she told the other woman as she stared at the grey asphalt, watching hypnotically as it rolled beneath them. “But I can’t quite place it.”

Rose shrugged. “I don’t see anything weird. It’s a perfectly clear road. Totally normal…”

“ _ Oh, _ ” both women breathed at the same time, finally coming to the realization of just what was so odd about that road. 

_ There was nothing on it.  _ On every other road they’d driven past, chaos and destruction had left its mark. On some roads they’d even had to get out of the car and move debris out of the way, and on others they’d swerved to avoid large, abandoned vehicles. This road held none of those hazards, it was perfectly clean.  _ Impeccably clean,  _ one might say. 

Rey’s breath left her in a rush. The dead didn’t leave clean roads. They didn’t care about making a mess or about keeping roads safe for cars to pass through, only the living did. So if the road ahead of them was clear… “There’s people here,” she said, her voice trembling with the realization. “They’re alive.”

“What?” Ben asked, waking abruptly from the stupor he’d been in for the last several minutes. 

“Ben, the roads are clean,” Rey told him excitedly. “There’s people! Living, breathing people!”

He sat up perfectly straight, examining the road for himself as Rey drove them down it, and she watched his jaw fall slack the moment he realized she was right. “They’re alive…”

“They are,” she confirmed, then she grinned again as she came upon a barricade at the end of the street, scanning the pathway it carved out along what had once been a four way intersection. The traffic lights were still hanging from wires above their heads, waiting to direct traffic that would never come, but the lights didn’t matter just then. No, what mattered was the scrappily built wall blocking off two sides of the street.  _ They were being led somewhere.  _ The positioning of the barricades was telling; it meant that someone didn’t want people to turn left or go straight—they wanted them to turn right. Something lay out there to the right, and Rey had a feeling it was something good. 

Gut instinct driving her every move, Rey turned the car to the right, and sped along down a new street until she hit another barricade, and turned again. “Keep your eyes out for people,” she told her passengers. “If the military is here, they may see us as a threat. We want to look as peaceful as possible.”

“You don’t have to worry about them,” Rose told her. “They have everyone pass through checkpoints. They just want to make sure no one’s coming in with terrorist intentions or with bite marks. They’ll inspect us, but I think once they hear what we have to say, we’ll be let through peacefully.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I’m one of them, remember?” Rose asked, then she reached into the pocket of the sweatshirt she’d stolen from the house that morning, and produced a very official looking badge declaring her ID. “We show them this, and we’re guaranteed not to get fucked with.”

Snorting quiet laughter, Rey gave another nod. “Okay. If you say this is going to work… I trust you.”

“You’ve known me for a day.”

“Yes, but I can tell you’re not one of the bad ones,” Rey said, then she watched Rose smile sheepishly as she stared out the window behind her. A surge of joy flooded through her as she turned her gaze back on the road, and continued following it until she suddenly caught sight of the downtown area.

The streets were lined with barricades that were twenty feet minimum in height, and each looked more daunting and threatening than the last. Spikes jutted out from the sides of each one, warring off any dead from daring to attempt climbing them, and on the tops, she saw railings that must’ve been linings of walkways for soldiers to pass. That theory was confirmed a minute later when she saw a group strolling past holding their guns against their bodies, watching Rey’s van intently as it drove by with curious expressions on their faces. 

“Pull over on the next street,” Rose told her. “We need to find out where to go to tell people about the cure.”

“Ask them where to find the Senate,” Ben added, then she glanced over at him to find him nervously picking at the skin of his fingers again. “That way we can kill two birds with one stone. I can find my mother and we can tell the government directly that there’s a cure and we need to distribute it immediately.”

Rey said nothing in response, and simply turned onto the next barricaded street, waiting until she saw men walking up and down its length before she finally pulled over, and cut the engine. “Let’s go.”

The encounter with their own military was tense. Once they stepped out of the car, the three were instantly surrounded by guns on all sides. Their hands flew into the air, their intentions of peace were made known, but it wasn’t until Rey announced why they were there and who they were looking for that the barrels slowly lowered until they were no longer a threat. 

From there, they were allowed access to the main part of the city, and given directions to the building now housing the remaining members of the United States Senate. Most importantly, they were given the room number for Senator Leia Organa from Georgia. Ben’s mother was _ alive.  _

The man beside her was tense the remainder of the ride to the ten story apartment complex, his hands gripping tightly to whatever hold they could find until Rey took one in her own, and he finally stood still. Even then he was buzzing with excitement, his entire body a livewire that she had no fears of touching as they approached the building where the family he feared was dead lived. According to the officers they’d spoken to, both Leia and Han had made it north, but in the weeks since they’d lost their son, they’d been in mourning. Neither had been seen or heard from much since arriving in Washington, and his mother had only appeared in scant few important senate meetings. 

The loss of their only son had utterly devastated them, and Rey couldn’t wait for the moment they saw he was alive and well again. Any awkwardness she felt about meeting the parents of the man she’d just hooked up with was out the window when she thought about the impending reunion. She’d thought the world was hopeless, and that everything was slowly going to hell and she would keep eating and breathing until her heart gave out, but now there was a chance for them to live again. A chance for them to start over. 

As soon as Rey put the car in park, Ben was rushing out the door, beelining through the complex to the room number the military had given them. She and Rose quickly jogged after him, making their way down a tight series of corridors to a stairwell that seemed to stretch up and up for ages. The two women followed after Ben’s enormous, loud footsteps as they clapped on the floor, and she found it difficult to keep up with him as he finally exited the stairs on the eighth floor. “Ben!” she cried, racing down the hallway after him with the soldier they’d rescued tight on her heels. 

He didn’t seem to hear her; Ben was too busy trying to find his family. She panted hard as she caught up to him when he stopped to bang on the door that he knew belonged to them. His fist pounded into the wood hard enough she feared it might break, but as she and Rose came to a stop behind him, the door opened, and a very annoyed looking Senator Organa glared at the man in front of it. For a split second, it looked as if she was going to rip him a new one for how hard and long he’d been knocking on her door, but then recognition set in, and her face fell into disbelief and awe as she processed the sight of her son standing before her. 

“ _ Ben _ ?” she whispered softly, then she stepped forward, and Rey watched with her heart racing in her chest as she reached up a hand, letting the skin of her fingers ghost over her son’s cheek. 

All Ben could do was nod. “Yeah, Mom,” he said after a while, his voice rife with tears. If she could have seen his face from that angle, she would’ve bet that tears were streaming down those cheeks of his as he spoke, falling from his eyes like lonely teardrops as he finally reunited with his family. “I’m alive… I—I made it.”

Leia hadn’t been given an explanation as to how that had happened yet, but it seemed that the how mattered very little to her in that moment. All that did matter was that he was there, that the son she’d been missing for weeks now was alive, and he had returned to her. This thought process was clear on her face as she let out a short, sharp cry Rey almost wasn’t even sure she heard as the senator wrapped her arms around her son, and pulled him into a forceful—but not unwelcome—hug. 

Her son returned it instantly, leaning down to hug his mother properly as she held him in her arms again. In the silence of the hallway, both of their sobs—a heavy mixture of joy and sorrow—chorused together to create an atmosphere that Rey had the impression she shouldn’t be privy to. She and Rose began making their way down the hall then, stopping only when they heard a gruff, masculine voice call out from behind them. “What the hell is going on out there?”

The two women stalled their retreat, stationing themselves in the midst of the long, winding hallway as they watched a man with white hair and a face aged somewhat gracefully by the weathering winds of time step out into it. At first, his eyes held the same pissed off, slightly confused look to them that Leia’s had, but then Han Solo had the very same realization his wife did just minutes ago, and though he didn’t seem the type to cry, it damn near broke Rey to head the sob that wrenched itself from his throat. 

“ _ Oh my god, _ ” they heard Han breathe, then the Organa-Solo’s blended into one another as the father joined in on the embrace. Both of his parents—and, Rey suspected, Ben himself—were crying rather loudly, but their cries weren’t in anguish. No, every single one carried a whoop of delight, relief, and contentment as they finally, properly reunited. 

For weeks, Leia and Han had thought their only son was dead, and they’d had to live with the memory of watching him die. Thanks to a lost fight and the twenty most petty seconds of Rey’s life, he was back, and they were never going to lose him again. 

After a few minutes, the family untangled themselves from each other, and Ben gestured down the hall to where Rey and Rose were still standing rather awkwardly, watching the whole thing unfold. “That’s her,” he told them, making her aware that he’d been actually maintaining a conversation with his parents beneath all the crying. “That’s the woman who saved me.”

Leia Organa’s eyes were on her in an instant, and she stepped out from behind her son’s broad frame to examine Rey, looking her up and down for a moment before she walked down the hall. Nerves flooded Rey’s system as the Senator approached, stopping a few feet away from her before she held out her hand. “I don’t even know where to begin with thanking you,” she began, then she shifted on her feet so she stood a bit taller. “But I suppose I can start by getting your name and welcoming you inside.”

A smile tugged on the corners of her mouth as Rey shook the older woman’s hand, ignoring the dampness she felt from the tears she’d just been crying. “I’m Rey,” she said, then they let go of one another, and she cleared her throat, quickly adapting a business-like tone. “Senator, we came up here not only with your son, but… with crucial information that could stop all of this, but we need your he—”

“Ben’s already told me what you did for him and this young woman right here.” She gestured to Rose, who was still standing awkwardly off to the side. “What’s your name?”

“I’m Rose, ma’am, Rose Tico,” she answered, stepping forward so that she could shake the senator’s hand as well.

“Welcome, both of you,” Leia replied, then she stepped back, and folded her hands over each other. “Come in. It seems that we have much to discuss.”

The two women in front of her nodded, then she turned on her heels, and headed back for her door, patting her son’s arm as the family entered the apartment first. Rey and Rose soon followed, then the five of them were walking into a small apartment that couldn’t have been more than two bedrooms—making her wonder how she and Ben would continue their sleeping arrangements from the last two nights—but was decorated rather nicely. Someone had clearly taken great care to ensure that none of the destruction and chaos from the outside world wound up within the walls of this humble abode. 

“This way,” Han announced, placing a hand on the small of his wife’s back before leading the group to a small, well lit dining room table that was absolutely covered with paperwork. “We’re going to want to sit down.”

“Ignore the mess, it’s been a busy few weeks,” Leia added, and Rey could see the anguish rippling over Ben’s face before he hid it again inside himself. Sympathy roared within her, but she said nothing, and opted to talk to him about it later. They held these kinds of conversations best when they were alone anyway. “From the sound of things it’s about to get even busier.”

“If fate allows, yes,” Ben replied as they all took their seats, and he, Rose, and Rey sat on one side of the table while his parents sat on the others. “But I think it will. It’s one thing if something happens once, and another if it happens again.”

His mother gave him a nod. “I agree,” she said, pulling a binder out of the center of the table, and opening it to a blank page. Silence fell over the group as she then grabbed a pen that had been lying loosely in front of her. “Since we’ve lost most major sources of electricity, we have to go back to recording things the old fashioned way,” she explained, then she glanced up at them. “So, tell me the full story, and leave out no details, but…” There was a mischievous, playful glint in her eye. “Do it slowly.”

*

They told Leia everything. 

She and Rose spared no stops, and neither did Ben—aside from leaving out a massive chunk of the night before which they’d spent mostly naked and making one another come so hard they couldn’t see straight—opting to refer to that chunk of the night as an early nap instead. His mother, though, was no fool, and the eyebrow she quirked upon hearing that they “turned in rather early that night,” had Rey’s entire body cringing. 

The fact that Ben had turned bright red because of it only made things a little better. 

By the end of it, the tiny embarrassment didn’t matter, though, because the conversation ended with Leia making a very crucial radio call. One she’d been praying to hear for the last several days since she’d first met Ben in the art museum. 

It was the call that asked for resources to be distributed in order to disperse the cure. The one that would start the end of the apocalypse. The beginning of the end. 

Rey nearly cried when Leia got the approval for a meeting, and she  _ did  _ let loose a tear when the other woman hung up the phone and announced that the senate was gathering together first thing in the morning to discuss what would go where. The world wasn’t doomed to descend into permanent madness. For the first time in months, they had a chance at living decent lives, and the Earth had a chance to heal. 

After the call was over, Rey and Rose were given a room down the hall to share. Well, Leia called it a room, but in truth it was a one bedroom apartment that was the last free space in the whole building. It wasn’t much, but considering the state of the room being shared by Ben’s family, she wagered it was a thousand times better than everywhere else she’d been staying at lately. 

The only problem she could think that it held, was that it didn’t allow room for Ben to stay with them, and though they’d only known one another a few days, that prospect was already disappointing. She’d been alone for two months before she’d met him, and after that first night when she’d shielded him from his nightmares, she’d started to get used to having him beside her in bed. It was nice to have someone there, and not just because of the attraction they shared between them, but because after all that loneliness, it was wonderful to finally feel surrounded by the warmth of another human being. 

“We’ll figure something out,” Ben told her, squeezing her hand as they all made their way out of the dining room to await the arrival of the keys to Rey and Rose’s new apartment. “I’ll talk to them.”

A blush crept up Rey’s cheeks as she reached up a hand, and rested it on his shoulder. “No, it’s okay, you should be with your family right now. I can wait another night. I survived without you for two months, remember?”  _ But she really didn’t want to go back to that. _

“Are you sure?” he asked, his voice soft and quiet like it always was when he was trying to make sure she was okay. One day, she could see herself loving him for it. 

The hand at his shoulder reached up to tuck a strand of his hair behind his ear. “We have time now, we don’t have to stay together tonight.” She leaned up to press a kiss to his cheek while his parents weren’t looking. “The world isn’t ending anymore.”

“Oh, yeah, right,” he replied awkwardly, a pink flush creeping up his cheeks. “I’ll um… I’ll let you go then.” With that, he began to step away, preparing to walk back to his parents before her hand shot out, and gripped him by the wrist. Surprise flared in his irises as he looked down at her, wondering what the motivation behind such a forceful action was as she beamed at him. 

“That doesn’t mean I don’t want you to kiss me goodbye,” she reminded him, then she tugged a little harder on his hand as he laughed, and pulled him into a kiss. Just like their others, it was sweet and full of promise, letting her know there would be many more to come after that, but this one was short, getting to its point rather quickly. Not wanting to overwhelm his parents—in the event that they turned their backs toward them again and caught the public display of affection—she pulled away almost as quickly as she’d come in, leaving him just a little breathless but not thoroughly kissed as she stepped back. “Kiss me again in the morning?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” he assured her, keeping his voice low as his mother opened their front door, and spoke to a man in an official looking black and white uniform. “Have a good night, Rey.”

“You too, Ben.”

“And before you go…” He leaned forward a little, whispering in her ear with a teasing hint in his voice as he spoke, “When they get civilization back on its feet, I’m still craving that frosty if you want to join me.”

It took all of Rey’s strength not to guffaw in response to that, and she swatted playfully at his arm as she nodded. “It's a date,” she promised him, then she gave him one last wink before turning her attention on Leia, and following the Senator, Rose, and the newly obtained apartment keys out of the Solo’s home, and into the hallway. 

*

The room they were led to was a cute little space. It was nicer than anything Rey had lived in at any point in the time before the dead, and the moment she stepped into it, she’d had to hide the way her jaw dropped. She didn’t need Leia to know her tragic backstory quite so soon just from the way she reacted to riches. 

The place was decorated in a pale, off white color scheme with black accents. Whoever had designed it had also opted for furniture with a similarly modern vibe, with flecks of color popping out here and there, and creating an atmosphere that felt unique to an IKEA catalogue. Of course, it had also been designed during the time before the dead ruled the earth, but Rey was glad to have it no matter what. 

Shortly after being given a tour, she and Rose were left to their own devices, and both women elected to sleep immediately. After the long and somewhat perilous journey she’d taken to get up there, Rey had earned a good night’s sleep, and thus was allowed by Rose to take the one bedroom in the apartment while she took the couch. 

Once she was lying down, though, sleep evaded her. No matter how much she refused to open her eyes, or how many position changes she made, she couldn’t fucking sleep. It was impossible. It felt as if she were stuck in a sea of static, and all the buzzing made her feel more awake and alert than ever. 

The hours passed her by restlessly, and by the time she opened her eyes again after surrendering to the inevitability that she wouldn’t be sleeping, it was nearly two in the morning. A groan left her lips that she prayed wouldn’t wake Rose, but the distant snoring from the other room told her that the soldier hadn’t heard a thing. Relief filled her as she slowly sat up, and stretched out the tension in her muscles as she decided she was going to go exploring. If she was going to be able to live now rather than just survive, she wanted to know what life had to offer her. 

Groaning again, she stood up, and made her way out of the bedroom and into the main area of the apartment, taking extra care not to wake Rose as she tiptoed past, and made her way to the front door. She was still rubbing the attempted sleep out of her eyes when she closed her fingers around the door knob, and therefore her vision was still blurry as she opened it, causing her to not recognize the silhouette of the man standing between her and the hallway for a second. 

Just before a scream could wrench itself from her throat, Ben’s voice whispered to her urgently, “Don’t scream!” And suddenly she realized who was in front of her, then her vision came into focus. 

“Ben,” she breathed, stepping back into the apartment to see him better. “What the hell are you doing here?”

He shrugged. “I couldn’t sleep,” he admitted. “What about you? Why are you up?”

“I couldn’t sleep either.” She stepped back again, and opened the door a little wider. “You want to be restless together?”

Ben didn’t hesitate to walk into the apartment, answering her with an action that spoke louder than any words ever could as he stepped in, and closed the door behind himself before taking her hand in his, and letting her lead him into the bedroom. The gesture could’ve been taken a number of ways, but the way his hand gripped hers she knew he wasn’t going in there with the intent of fucking her into her mattress—another day, surely, but not this one—no, he needed someone to remind him he wasn’t alone that night. If she were being honest, she needed the exact same thing. 

Neither of them said a word as they walked into her bedroom, the door closing behind them was the only sound they could hear before they walked around to one side of the mattress, and climbed beneath the comforter one after the other. As Ben rolled onto his side, Rey shifted toward him until she was flush against his back once again, and she wrapped an arm around his waist while pressing a gentle kiss to one of the ridges of his spine. She felt him shiver from the contact, then they both settled into the position, and she sighed against him. 

“We saved the world today,” he whispered, breaking their silence as his hand gripped hers where it laid casually over the center of his chest. 

“We did.”

“Rey?”

“Yeah?”

“I never thanked you,” he said, then he adjusted his grip on her hand. “For saving me.”

“I’m sure you did at some point.”

“Maybe, but I can’t remember it,” he admitted, then he brought her hand to his lips, and she felt him press a kiss to her fingers. “So thank you, and maybe thank you  _ again. _ ”

She kissed his back again, then she rested her forehead against him as she gripped him a little more tightly, more grateful than ever that she’d gotten lucky enough to have found him in the cruel world they lived in. “I’d do it a thousand more times,” she promised, then she squeezed his hand again as she yawned. “We should try and sleep.”

“Yeah, see you in the morning.”

“See you,” she replied, tempted to add more to that sentence, but she knew it wasn’t time yet. They were still so new to one another, so fresh, and she didn’t want to risk their attraction to one another being nothing but some sort of infatuation from how they’d met. Rey had a feeling the connection between them ran deeper than that, but only time would tell, and now that they had it, she intended to use every minute taking it slow with him. She wanted to spend as much as she could just learning how to be with him, or learning more about him, and now that the world was on the cusp of healing, she had a feeling they were about to become something great. 

All they had to do now was wait for it. 


	6. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so it ends! Thank you so much to everyone who read this fic, y’all made my day sometimes 💖

** _One year later:_ **

Sunlight had never been more blinding in all the other places Rey had lived. For some reason, high in the eroded, northeastern Appalachian mountains, it shone more brightly than it did anywhere else. In particular, it did so right through the window of her bedroom, sparkling directly into her hazel eyes as it rose with the rotation of the earth which orbited it. 

A soft groan escaped her lips as she turned away from the sunlight, and her face made contact with the broad chest of the man sharing the bed with her, causing a smile to blossom instead of the grimace she’d originally intended. Firm arms flexed around her, wrapping them firmly in their grip as warmth radiated from him to her, making Rey feel as if she were floating. 

Lips pressed to the crown of her head, and a fist formed in her hair as she tilted her head back, and looked up into the eyes of the man she’d grown to love over the past year. They were hooded when she met them, and when it became clear they had no intention of opening further, Rey leaned up, and kissed him as gently as she could. 

He hummed into the kiss, making her wonder for a moment if somehow she was dreaming, and the last peaceful, blissful year had been just a fantasy. She knew without a shadow of a doubt it wasn’t as he rolled onto his back, and pulled her on top of him while they kissed, confirming the beautiful reality they now lived in. 

The world still wasn’t quite what it was. The extent of the epidemic that had turned the living into the dead was so vast it would probably take the earth decades to truly repair itself, but they’d made a good start. Since they’d begun their mission, millions had already been turned back into the living, and thus the old luxuries of life they’d been accustomed to had started to return. Electricity was available in parts of the world again, for one, but the only one they seemed to care about was that they’d managed to get food mass produced again, and thus restaurants began to open up in the majorly populated areas. 

In particular, they’d gotten a Wendy’s up and running. The food wasn’t the same as she remembered, but then again, the world wasn’t either. She’d just been so happy to have it, she didn’t care. They were getting their lives back, and that was just their first step. 

That had also been their first dinner date. Their first actual date had been a drive into Canada once border control was up and running again, and he’d taken her up to see the Northern lights. They’d spent the ten hour drive bonding and learning more about one another, then the next week doing the same… and having a lot of sex beneath the stars on the blankets they’d brought. 

From there, they’d only grown closer. Their attraction to one another had rather quickly turned into a genuine and permanent love. She was a part of Ben now as much as he was a part of her, and though they’d said they’d take things slow, it became apparent very quickly that they clicked with one another in a way they clicked with no one else. As they saved the world piece by piece, she knew he was it for her. 

One year into their relationship, they stayed in a cabin in the woods to commemorate the occasion. They’d considered camping, but decided against it given the surprisingly cool, June temperatures and rain falling all around them. The weather didn’t detract from the mountain’s beauty, though, and so they stayed, taking pictures with an old polaroid camera of their surroundings, each other, and the things they did there. 

That included the moment he had gotten down on one knee the night before and asked her to marry him. He’d done it by handing her the camera, and asking her to close her eyes for ten seconds, taking a picture when her mental count reached ten. She did exactly as he asked, and the resulting picture was of a slightly blurry, but very hopeful looking Ben with a ring in his hand and a hint of a smile on his face as he asked her those four little words. 

The ring now sat on her finger, the gold band boasting one, fairly sizeable diamond that his fingers brushed past as they laced with hers, and she giggled into the kiss in response. “Mmm, you’re going to have to stop laughing every time I kiss you,” Ben said softly against her lips, then he kissed her again briefly. “It’s going to make the next several decades a bit harder than they need to be.”

“Oh, come on, I don’t do it every time,” she muttered, smacking his bare chest lightly with her palm as she moved back, and folded her arms before resting her chin over his chest. “Just once.”

“Twice, ever since I asked you to marry me,” Ben reminded her, then his voice took on a more sarcastic tone. “If this is what married life with you is going to be like, I’ll have to reconsider.”

“I don’t think so, you’re the one who asked me.” She beamed at him, then she leaned forward again, and pressed a kiss to the base of his neck. “You’re stuck with me and my giggles, there’s no escape.”

“Considering I’m pinned under you right now, I couldn’t escape you if I wanted to,” he reminded her. “And I definitely don’t want to.” With a slow, shaky exhale, he then reached up, and brushed back a piece of her hair. “Rey, I love you, kiss giggles and all.”

She kissed his neck again, this time a little higher on the column of his throat. “I love you, too,” she whispered, then she moved up, and kissed him properly. His lips caressed hers, conveying the meaning of his last words to her anew with his kiss as he gripped her tightly in his arms, then he rolled them over so that he was on top of her again as it began to grow heated. Though they’d already spent most of the night—it had been three hours past midnight when they’d finally fallen asleep—making love, Rey was more than happy to go another round that morning. It wasn’t every day she was newly engaged, after all. She was obligated to have far more sex than was necessary, and so she let herself sink into the mattress with him, the morning passing them by as they celebrated their engagement. 

Everything was slowly falling into place, and while the world was still far from perfect, Rey knew it was enough for them to make their life together. As time passed, she knew they’d create a world where they could live their married life as happily as they wished, where everyone could start from scratch, no matter who they were. That thought put a smile on her face as she wrapped her legs around her fiancé’s, and kissed him fiercely in the early morning light. 

The world had nearly come to an end. Their surroundings had hinged on what could only be described as apocalyptic, and everything had fallen apart, yet all it took was one dumb assed moment of spite to change everything. Rey ran a hand over his wrist where she’d bitten him and inadvertently brought him back to life, then she laced her fingers through his, grounding them both to reality as he entered her slowly. For once in her life, she found she rather enjoyed the sights she saw in her waking hours rather than her dreams, and as Ben began to move inside of her, causing both of them to moan from pleasure, she knew she’d never have to rely on her dreams for peace again. 

The apocalypse was over, and their lives were only just beginning. 

  
  
  
  



End file.
